Sandtray Play in Education

This is a manual for training teachers in the Sandtray Play in Education method. It is a creative learning tool for use by school counselors, psychologists and special education teachers who have access to a private learning space.

Sandtray Play in Education introduces a holistic approach to childhood education that returns the child's natural medium of creative play to the learning environment. Sadly, most approaches to contemporary childhood education are not successful in teaching children the riches of language and numbers and the capacities to think, inquire and create. We are failing our children by not designing educational curricula that is appropriate to the learning styles of children.

The book is the culmination of the collaboration of learning specialist Kristín Unnsteinsdóttir and Barbara Turner, Sandplay psychotherapist, who have worked together to develop a tool that draws on the child`s inner world to support and inform his or her learning and growth in the school setting.

Together they have created a way that a well-trained counsellor or learning specialist in Sandtray Play in Education can work individually with a small group of students, side-by-side, each giving birth to the fruits of imagination and creative play as the fashion their own worlds in the trays.

Using the same miniature figures and tray of sand used in the Jungian Sandplay method, Sandtray Play is not a psychotherapeutic modality, rather it is a creative play tool adapted to provide school children with an engrossing, self-directed, imaginative activity.