Sand and water tables provide many educational opportunities for younger children. Social atmospheres and play time help students with their natural emotional and cognitive development. When teachers provide opportunities such as a sand and water table for play, students get to explore using different types of manipulatives. Teachers can help engage students in more valuable learning opportunities using different types of manipulatives at the play table in addition to creating different learning environments. For example, teachers can designate specific tasks at the table, but can also allow free exploration for students. By providing students with different beakers and 3-D shaped objects, students can explore different concepts such as equal values, volumes, shapes, etc. This article explains that it is important to allow free exploration first so that the children become socially comfortable as well as get used to some of the manipulatives. Once free exploration has been done, the teacher can introduce different concepts. This might mean that the teacher would point out the numbers on the side of a beaker and help guide the students to figure out what the numbers mean. After the concept introduction, the teacher can use application of the concept. Students then get to choose their own manipulatives/materials and explore concepts through concepts that have been introduced. The final stage is the evaluation stage. The teacher informally can evaluate students the entire process. Some teachers use checklists based on whether or not children are observed using different mathematical concepts. Other children are evaluated on specific concepts and whether or not they can complete specific objectives.
One of the activities described in the article was a dinosaur dig. Students got to play the role of archaeologists to dig for dinosaur bones and artifacts. The students then were asked to sort their artifacts based on what they believed 'fit together' by their characteristics. The students then created a graph based on their real artifacts and compared the data that they had dug from the sand/water table. We use this activity in the pre-school that I sub for and the students LOVE it. Students like getting to play the role of an dinosaur expert and love to dig up artifacts and dinosaur bones. This activity provides great mathematical concepts for children such as qualitative and quantitative data as well as sorting things based on their characteristics. Also, students get to use graphs to show the results of their data. Overall, I think that using the sand and water play table is a great idea because it opens up many opportunities to integrate the NCTM standards as well as a lot of inquiry-based teaching.
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