Heart and hand prints in the salt tray in prek – Teach Preschool (2024)

I recently shared how we have started writing in the salt tray and I have to say, my kids love the salt trays. I have learned a few things about using a salt tray and have been exploring a few additional ideas to keep the salt tray experience interesting to my class…

What I have learned

The amount of salt you place in the tray makes a difference. I received an email from one of my readers and she gave me permission to share her salt tray tips and this photo with you (see below)…

Nancy Earnestsays…

“We use asalttray in our classroom and encourage the children to use just their fingers in the tray (vs sensory table when it has sand which is whole hand).Our salt tray has only about 1/3 cup of salt in it so that they get a visual of what they “write” in the tray. Having a dark color on the bottom of the container is valuable. Dark colored cake pans or cookie sheets work fine.And yes it does take some self control for them not to put their whole hand in. It happens but they gradually work towards appropriate use.”

I just love the tray Nancy uses in her classroom and after reading Nancy’s thoughtful insight to the salt tray, I went back and thinned down the amount of salt I had in each tray. Nancy was right, using less salt in the trays works much better for printing in the salt. I also found two sturdy boxes to use for my salt boxes. I set out the new salt boxes and a few heart shaped cookie cutters to let the children explore both printing and writing…

The children loved making prints with the hearts in our salt boxes. I added the heart shaped cookie cutters since we were talking about the shape of a heart in our lesson for the day…

I am going to keep my salt boxes as our “permanent” salt boxes but because I only had two salt boxes and four children wanted to play, I went ahead and spread the salt between four trays so each of the children could have their own salt tray to work with at the writing table…

I have already seen an improvement in the children’s use of the salt trays. One little boy eagerlypracticed writing all the letters in his name – when he completed each letter he would shout, “Look Mrs. Stewart – I made a Z!”…

The children printed hearts, and made letters for quite some time before moving on to other things. I was very surprised when one of our boys came up with this super cute handprint with a heart shape in the middle then all the children wanted to give it a try…

Of course, watching the children make their heart and hand prints got me thinking that the “heart in the hand” would make a super cute art project for Valentine’s day too!!

Some of my students discovered that if you lightly shake the salt tray, the lines and shapes go away so you can start again…

I will continue to share the salt boxes (or trays) with the children and continue to encourage them to work on writing the words they know along the way. We are all learning something new from this experience each time we try it…