Sandmagination is set to open at the Northshore Mall in Peabody in late spring, according to a press release.
Designed for kids aged 10 and under, the facility will feature interactive exhibits, play stations as well as STEAM and STEM activities. The space will be fully accessible and designed for children of all abilities.
The goal of Sandmagination is for children to learn and explore through hands-on play in a sensory-rich environment.
Sandmagination is the brain child of a local STEAM-y STEM-y couple - she's a biotech PhD, he's an IT guy/writer - who created the space with their own kids in mind.
“At Sandmagination, we are building a space where kids can unleash their creativity, explore, and learn in ways that are both fun and meaningful,” the couple said in the press release. “As parents, we know how important it is to provide a safe learning environment, and we cannot wait to open doors here in Peabody.”
It all sounds wonderful, and I love the idea of kiddos having the opportunity to have a sandbox experience, where they get to enjoy - as the Sandmagination website states - an "experience that combines STEAM-based learning, sensory exploration, and hands-on creativity. Our interactive exhibits inspire children to experiment, build, and discover through open-ended, imaginative play."
Yes indeedy. Get the kids away from the screens and into a place where they can just dig in. It all sounds great, but it did make me a bit wistful for the the days of yore when kids got to create, explore, experiment, learn, whatever - in a space that may not have been an intentional STEAM-designed, "safe learning environment" but was a fabulous, unsupervised, kids-only, outdoor place where you could have - dare I say it - just plain fun.
The sandbox of my childhood was pretty good sized - in my memory, it was huge, but I'm guessing it was only about 36 square feet. It was made up of four knocked-together boards with triangular watch-out-for-slivers seats at each corner. There was no foundation, no floor. The boards were just pushed into the ground a bit - no doubt by my father hammering or stomping on them - and the whole shebang all held together by those corner seats. It was located in a shady spot in the yard, right next to the wooded ravine that was part of our property.
My father was no carpenter, but he was handy enough to build for us what was, in those simpler times, a fantastic place for "sensory exploration," etc.
I can't remember what the original color of the sandbox was - green, I think - but at some point it was repainted in an ugly orchid. (For some reason, I think we used to call this color pistachio.) There was nothing in our house of that color, so it wasn't leftover from anyting. And I can't imagine that my father deliberately chose it. My guess is that he went to the hardware store and they had a quart of a color that someone had buyer's remorse about after it had been mixed. So it was available for near-free. Sold!
Color aside, our sandbox was wonderful, and I spent many hours there - with my sibs, with my friends, on my own.
I/we made sand castles, shoveling dampish sand into buckets, pounding it down, unmolding it, and decorating the ramparts with sticks, leaves, pebbles, and scraps of paper (those were the flags).
We made tracks through the sand and raced the boys metal Tonka trucks, and the cheesy green/silver and red/silver rubber cars with yellow wheels you could get at Woolworth's for a dime. (These days, you can get one on eBay for $12.95.) I may be crazy, but I think the heads of driver and passenger were often decapitated, bitten off by someone unleashing their inner Ozzy Osbourne, before we knew that Ozzy Osbourne even existed.
We also brought our dolls out to the dandbox beach. And we played restaurant and picnic, making "food" out of patties of sand, twigs, weeds, leaves, pebbles, berries, acorns and pignuts. (I don't know where those red berries came from, but we knew/thought they were poisonous, so didn't eat them. We did occasionally dig the meat out of pignuts and take a bit of a taste, but that meat, while it may have been harmless, was bitter.
We celebrated spring by heading to the sand-and-gravel pit to buy a couple of bushel baskets of clean sand to restore the sandbox for the coming season.
I'm not sure when I outgrew our sandbox. Maybe age 10, the upper edge of the Sandmagination age range. But I hung on for a while, playing there with my sister Trish (a decade my junior) when she didn't have any of her buddies around.
Anyway, our sandbox was nothing fancy, but it was just plain magnificent. All it was lacking was the ability to fly - unlike the flying sandbox chronicled in one of my favorite early-childhood books, the eponymous Flying Sandbox. Or course, since our sandbox was bottomless - and completely destroyed the grass under it; it took decades after the sandbox was decommissioned for the grass to grow back in as anything other than dead yellow - if our sandbox took flight, we would have been hanging on to those corner seats for dear life.
Good luck to the Sandmagination. However brainy and planned out it is, I'm sure the kids will have fun. And I hope that some of them imagine taking off and flying around the neighborhood in it.
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