Kenitic Sand

My sister brought the kids some "kinetic" sand for Christmas. It wasn't actually kinetic sand, it was another make, but I cant remember the name and they are all pretty much the same thing and you all know what I mean when I say kinetic sand, so I'll stick to that. 

The sand was a big hit with the kids, who loved playing with it, but what I think was the best bit about the present was the moulds that came with the set. In the past we have a few sets, that came with a few different moulds, such a sea creatures and also cars, but this set came with castle moulds. They ranged in size from small scale moulds, with wall and towers to much larger walls and also a pyramid and tower complete with stairs. 

The little man spend most of the time building towers from the bigger sets, naming them Towers of Doom for some reason, this was almost immediately copied by the young lady, who started building her own Towers of Doom. 

Tower of Doom

Tower of Doom MkX

This was one of the young ladies towers.

Building these towers kept the kids occupied for quite some time over a number of days, repeating the cycle of building and destroying and rebuilding again. The little man has got quite good at keeping the sand on the try, however, the young lady has not quite mastered this yet and a fair portion of the sand ends up on the floor! Luckily, its simple to pick the sand up again and put it back in with the rest. Granted over time the sand wonders off and your suddenly left with not enough sand to build even the smallest building. Christmas gave us plenty of refills though, as we had several packs given to us and we have kept some back to top up as we get low. 

While there are lots of different types of Kinetic sand out there, the original Kinetic sand still seems to be the best, although the last lot we got, with the castle building seems pretty good, I think that its Motion Sand, either way its pretty good stuff. We have had Cra-Z-Sand in the past and I don't think that this is as good, that's not to say it's rubbish, but it's quite different and more sand like, so it doesn't seem to hold as well and makes a lot more mess, that's a lot harder to clean up. The moulds that came with the cra-z-sand however are pretty good and have little tabs on the top to help you hold them, which is very useful.

I have to say that it's not just the kids that enjoyed playing with the sand either, i had a great time building a castle with all the various bits and pieces.

Castle Burden overview

Front view

A close-up of the main castle

Birds eye view of the castle, I'm sure there are various names for certain parts of a castle, but i cant remember any and I'm not interested enough to go searching for them! 

Slight accident while building.

It was fun building the castle and i managed to use up every price of sand! I literally had to scratch around to gather the last bits of sand to finish the last mould and finish off the walls but i think it was worth it. Granted, i should have been doing some house work instead of playing with the sand, but hey, everybody needs a little break. The bairns though it was great, and did play with it for a few minutes. Unfortunately the little man's idea of play tends to be build it and then break it, so you can imagine what came next!

3

2

1

And destroyed! Yep, it took me about 10 minutes to build the castle and took the pair of them about 30 second to destroy it! They were giggling and making crashing sounds the whole time they were destroying the castle, so i don't mind at all, as they were having fun and i wasn't really expecting anything less. Next time the kids have the sand out again, i may well try and build another castle, just because i can.