I’ve put together small “construction sites” for Veronika before (and for big brother Travis, too, when he was younger), but when a huge bag of play sand arrived today, I knew we had to set up the biggest version yet!

You could do this activity outside in a real sandbox, too, if you have one at home or a neighborhood playground.

We also wanted to collect little rocks for our site and headed outside with a bucket. I poured the sand into a large storage bin and added the rocks along one side. We then added Veronika’s construction vehicles.

The trucks were soon very busy!

Veronika sprinkled sand into the dump truck.

She loved using the front loader to push rocks around.

And then there was just lots of driving trucks around and burying rocks in the sand!

Needless to say, the rocks didn’t stay gathered along one side for long. Older toddlers may want to be more deliberate with their “building”, though, gathering rocks in one place, or building them up into structures.

Travis definitely needed in on this one. His favorite part was burying trucks in the sand, to be unearthed in a big rescue.

The high sides of the storage bin even meant that all the sand stayed in the box!

And the lid meant we didn’t have to clean-up, but could simply cover the box and set it aside for next time. One thing’s for sure: We’ll be pulling this one out again soon.