Moon Sand
Moon Sand: The new adventure island play set
£24.99
We put Moon Sand in our must-have children’s Christmas list but not after giving it a thorough testing with some over-excitable children.
Moon Sand is mouldable sand aimed at children from three years old. We selected a two children and let them loose with the Moon Sand Adventure Island. This retails at around £25.00, comes is a sandbox carry case, and contains nine moulds, one boat, the carry case, and 2.5lb of Moon Sand.
After unwrapping the packet we decided to withhold two packets of the sand, as it was obvious that with uncoordinated little hands the colours would mix straight away.
The sand needs a bit of playing with first to warm it up but after 10 minutes you can mould animals that can be dropped from a height of five ft and still remain intact. They moulded animals can be played with and moved around, but as says on the instructions, this does depend on the model makers ability and the sand does have to be tightly packed to achieve this result.
It is a strangely therapeutic substance to play with. It can rub between your fingers like sand but also be moulded to stick together. It feels like play dough but what the children liked about it was that it did not make their hands greasy at all and just rubbed off of body parts, and clothes without leaving a stain or mess.
Two-year-old Sid loved Moon Sand. It is not aimed at his age group but the minute the sand filled the handy contained he immediately assembled a crew of Matchbox diggers and lorries and constructed a transport system. Across the island carefully moulded animals found themselves living between bypasses and busy motorways.
Six-year-old Emily loved Moon Sand. “It’s more fun then going to the beach. It’s really good. I think it is very nice,” she says. Hardly a startling revelation considering Emily lives in the tropical paradise of Weston-Super-Mare.
One of the good points of Moon Sand is that it does give children a chance to play with sand. Many children live in flats and so can’t practically have a sand pit in the house. Also our clement English weather rules out the beach for 11 months of the year.
Moon Sand is a great toy but does need respect. A great big mess mat put down means you can collect and avoid loosing spilt sand. It is easy to clean up as it sticks together and you can use this tactic to pick it up from the floor.
Moon Sand claims that it does not stick or stain and this was true for us. We did not end up with any stained clothes, or soft furnishings and the children genuinely enjoyed playing with this for about an hour. It brushed off of clothes easily and this was tested after Chopsy child Sid crawled through the play set as he constructed his motorway.
If you do buy this for children over 18 months then get the sandcastle pack. This is all one colour and so you won’t have to worry about colours blending. This would be perfect for the two – threes. The coloured packs suit older children with much more coordination.
Look after your Moon Sand. If you don’t respect this toy and look after it you will find your sand collection rapidly depleting, and there is actually no need for this to happen.
We liked Moon Sand and felt there was a different product of it available for a range of ages. If you just buy a refill pack without moulds then don’t be surprised when you find there isn’t much you can do with it, as the moulds are an important part of it.
We recommend adult supervision if you have the kind of children who can’t behave themselves for two minutes otherwise you will be finding Moon Sand castles in your bed hours later.