Sabbiarelli
Creativity for learning
“In 2011, when we decided to enter the toy business introducing a new way of colouring with sand, we could not imagine that in a few years we would grow from a single 12-colour kit to a wide range made up of scores of sand-painting games, including drawings and coloured sands in different formats. I think the secret of this success consists in staying faithful to the original project, i.e. to propose games that could follow the children’s manual skills development, making them instantly able to create beautiful sand pictures by themselves”, says Nadia Vallenari, general manager and founder – together with Alberto Ferrari, her husband – of the Sabbiarelli company.
As she talks about the characteristics of this artistic game, Vallenari is keen to stress its educational values: “The Sabbiarelli colours, with their natural brightness, are often chosen as artistic and creative games. However, the Sabbiarelli games give sand the features of an organized and sensory way of playing, offering many positive aspects from an educational point of view too and promoting the children’s psychic and cognitive development from 3 years of age on. Therefore, Sabbiarelli combines fun, creativity and the opportunity to make use of different cognitive and motor skills, such as improving concentration, sharpening fine handling, planning and arranging the activities, sustaining sensory development and, last but not least, assisting self-esteem. Furthermore, with Sabbiarelli it is possible to teach how important recycling is. The medium is the message, and actually it is right inside the structure of the Sabbiarelli pen that an important message to the children can be found: the sand that is left over can be recovered. In fact, the Sabbiarelli pens’ tips can be unscrewed and so become functional funnels in order to put the sand that has not stuck to the drawings back into the pen”.
