Equip your counseling space with a digital sandtray and curated miniatures. Flexible for any theoretical approach, ready for telehealth, and grounded in professional ethics.
Enter your name and activation code, and your dashboard opens instantly. Launch a session, run an icebreaker, pull up a framework, or grab a note template. No passwords. No app to install.
Sandtray draws on nearly a century of play-therapy literature. Here’s the short version you can stand behind — and hand to an administrator.
Counselors: the full citation library — 30+ peer-reviewed studies, filterable by topic — lives in your counselor dashboard under Resources.
How the browser-based tray works in practice — access, settings, and security.
You open your dashboard with your name and activation code, then launch a session. For telehealth, Sandstories generates a unique session URL containing a one-time 6-digit code — share that link with your client and they open directly into the tray. No download, no account, no login on their end. The code expires the moment you close the session and is never recycled, so there’s no way for a client to reopen a previous tray. In person, you can hand over a device or display the tray on a shared screen. Either way, the client never reaches your dashboard.
Both. A digital tray removes geographic barriers in telehealth, but it’s just as useful in person — no sand to sanitize, nothing to haul between offices or sites, and setup takes seconds. Many practitioners use it as their primary tray even when a physical one is available.
Yes. You can share the session URL with multiple participants — each opens the tray with the same one-time code on their own device — or project a single tray on a screen for the group to interact with together. Group sandtray introduces additional facilitation considerations — pacing, turn-taking, and the relational dynamics of a shared tray — so clinical judgment and group facilitation training apply just as they would with any group expressive modality.
Sandstories is designed with HIPAA-aligned principles: sessions run over encrypted connections, and we store zero Protected Health Information (PHI) on our servers. No client names, identifiers, or session content are retained after a session ends.
That said, HIPAA compliance is ultimately a practice-level responsibility. Any screenshots you export become part of your clinical record and should be handled under your existing documentation and storage policies. If your setting requires a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), contact us — we’re happy to discuss what that looks like for your practice or organization.
Your practice requires intentional tools. Beyond the digital tray, our shop provides the physical resources to outfit your office; saving you time and energy.
Sandstories exists to help people give shape to their stories. We believe every person has an innate capacity to process experience and heal when given a safe, expressive outlet—and that the counselor, not the tool, is what makes that possible. Those convictions shape every decision we make, from how the tray works to how we ask you to use it.
Three beliefs guide the work. We hold to theoretical neutrality: the tray is a blank canvas that adapts to your framework rather than imposing one of its own, so directive, non-directive, and systemic approaches all fit. We hold to dignity in accessibility: high-quality therapeutic tools shouldn’t be a luxury, which is why the tray runs in any browser and our shop curates second-life miniatures that school counselors and private practitioners can actually afford. And we hold to ageless expression: expressive work belongs across the whole lifespan, from elementary classrooms to hospice care.
Sandstories is a supplementary expressive tool for licensed practitioners and qualified school counselors—not a diagnostic instrument, a medical device, or a replacement for therapy. It doesn’t analyze trays, interpret symbols, generate diagnostic codes, or assess clients. The licensure, the training, and the clinical judgment are entirely yours, and you remain responsible for working within your scope of practice and your profession’s ethical guidelines. We see that as a feature, not a limitation: the meaning of a tray belongs to your client and to you, never to a piece of software.
Bringing any digital tool into practice raises real questions—distance counseling, data privacy, informed consent, and equitable access. Rather than ask you to bend your ethics around our product, we built Sandstories to meet the standards you’re already accountable to.
Sandstories supports the ASCA Ethical Standards for School Counselors, specifically Technology and Digital Citizenship (A.14) and Virtual/Distance School Counseling (A.15). It runs entirely in a browser—no installs, no special hardware—so students in low-income, rural, or remote districts aren’t left out. Its open-ended, expressive medium suits younger students who can’t yet put complex feelings into words. And because you can securely export tray screenshots, you can track a student’s growth and problem-solving over time, in step with ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors goals.
Sandstories aligns with the ACA Code of Ethics, Section H and the NBCC Policy for Distance Professional Services. Each session uses its own access path, so clients never reach your dashboard and you stay in full control of the clinical environment. We store zero Protected Health Information (PHI) on our servers, and sessions run over encrypted connections with no client data retained after a session ends—so confidentiality stays exactly where it belongs, in your hands.
Sandtray is a form of play therapy, and APT’s ethical guidelines apply when it’s used as a clinical modality. Sandstories is built to support trained practice, not to shortcut it: the tool provides the medium, while the clinical judgment, pacing, and containment belong entirely to you. APT’s expectations for case notes, supervision, and consultation apply to digital sandtray sessions exactly as they do to in-person work.
Both ASCA and ACA require informed consent before using technology-based tools with clients. For Sandstories, that means disclosing that sessions use a browser-based digital sandtray, explaining how tray screenshots are handled and exported, and noting that Sandstories stores zero PHI. A brief clause covering “use of digital expressive tools including browser-based sandtray” in your standard forms is typically sufficient.
The questions licensed practitioners actually bring to supervision — and to conversations with administrators, colleagues, and billing departments — before adding a new tool to their practice.
Yes. Sandtray draws on decades of validated play therapy literature, and multiple meta-analyses (Bratton et al., 2005; Lin & Bratton, 2015; Wiersma et al., 2022) report moderate-to-large effect sizes across trauma, anxiety, grief, and behavioral concerns. See our evidence brief for key citations.
Yes — and that’s worth saying plainly. The Association for Play Therapy (APT) requires documented training and supervised hours before practitioners use play therapy techniques clinically, and sandtray falls under that umbrella. Sandstories is designed to support trained practice, not shortcut it.
If you’re newer to sandtray, APT’s Registered Play Therapist (RPT) pathway and sandtray-specific trainings are the right starting point. If you’re already trained, the dashboard frameworks and protocols are built to complement and deepen the work you’re already doing.
It works across the lifespan. Many practitioners find it especially powerful with adults who tend to talk around their problems — because the work is non-verbal and projective, it moves past the verbal defenses adults rely on. Couples, veterans, hospice patients, and everyday outpatient clients can externalize and process material that would take much longer to reach through talk alone. On the younger end, the digital format works well with school-age children and older elementary students; very young children typically benefit more from hands-on sensory play with physical sand.
Focus on process over interpretation. Most practitioners document what’s observable — what was built, what was named, what shifted — rather than assigning meaning to the tray. Keep your notes within your existing documentation and compliance workflow, just as you would for any session.
Yes, and clinical judgment is paramount. While sandtray is an exceptionally flexible medium, clinical literature flags caution when working with active dissociation, recent psychotic episodes, or any crisis state where projective expressive work might destabilize a fragile client.
As with any expressive modality, your training in pacing and containment matters far more than the tool itself. Sandstories supports your clinical expertise — the decision to introduce a tray should always align with your client’s current stability and readiness.