Clinician Resources
Frameworks, prompts, templates, and protocols for using the sandtray with intention. Every resource is grounded in published literature and designed to be printed, photocopied, and stuck on a clinician’s wall.
Theory Frameworks
One-page guides to the major frameworks behind sandtray work. Use them to choose your stance for a session, or to defend your approach in supervision and documentation.
Kalffian Sandplay
Dora Kalff’s “free and protected space,” the symbolic process, and what non-directive really means in a digital tray.
Open guide → TheoryPolyvagal-Informed Sandtray
How Stephen Porges’s autonomic states show up in the tray, and how to track ventral / sympathetic / dorsal across a session.
Open guide → TheoryLowenfeld’s World Technique
The original 1929 frame: the child as world-builder, the adult as silent witness. How it differs from Kalffian sandplay — and why it matters for school counselors.
Open guide → TheoryNMT-Informed Sandtray (Bruce Perry)
Regulate → Relate → Reason: bottom-up sequencing in the tray, with dosing guidance for highly dysregulated clients and students with ACEs.
Open guide → TheoryWindow of Tolerance (Siegel)
Reading hyperarousal and hypoarousal in the build, and using the tray to bring clients back within their window — and widen it over time.
Open guide → TheoryPerson-Centered & Child-Centered
Rogers’s three conditions and Landreth’s CCPT applied to the tray. The non-directive stance, Axline’s eight principles, and what tracking sounds like in practice.
Open guide → TheoryAdlerian Sandtray
Kottman’s four-phase Adlerian Play Therapy, reading lifestyle and goals of misbehavior in the tray, and the central role of encouragement over praise.
Open guide → TheoryCBT & TF-CBT in Sandtray
Externalizing thoughts, building the cognitive triangle, and where trauma-focused CBT’s PRACTICE components connect to tray work — with scope-of-practice cautions.
Open guide → TheoryGestalt Sandtray
Oaklander’s present-moment, whole-person approach: speaking as a figure, working with unfinished business, and the tray as creative experiment.
Open guide → TheorySolution-Focused Sandtray
Preferred-future builds, exception trays, and scaling in the sand. The SFBT framework adapted for brief school counseling formats.
Open guide → TheoryNarrative Therapy & Sandtray
White & Epston’s framework: externalizing the problem, finding unique outcomes, and building the preferred-identity tray as an alternative story.
Open guide → TheoryMulticultural & Relational-Cultural
Auditing your figure library, reading symbols across cultures, RCT’s growth-fostering relationship, and culturally humble practice with the tray.
Open guide →Prompt Libraries
Build-a-world prompts grouped by clinical goal. Use sparingly — most sandtray work is non-directive — but indispensable when a client is stuck or when a brief session calls for a focused frame.
Worry & Anxiety
Twelve prompts for externalizing worry, building a safe place, and looking back from a future where the worry has shrunk.
Open library → PromptsGrief & Loss
Memory worlds, “what they would say,” continuing bonds, and prompts that hold space without rushing — including ambiguous and disenfranchised loss.
Open library → PromptsStrengths & Identity
Build-the-self worlds, hero journeys, the “people in my corner,” and ASCA-aligned identity work for Tier 1 and post-incident sessions.
Open library → PromptsAnger & Frustration
Externalizing anger as creature, mapping it in the body, finding what’s underneath, and building a safe place where the anger is allowed to be big.
Open library → PromptsSchool Stress
Test anxiety, perfectionism, and performance pressure. Twelve prompts for untangling self-worth from achievement and surviving exam week intact.
Open library → PromptsTransitions & Change
School moves, custody shifts, immigration, re-entry after long absence. Twelve prompts for carrying continuity across the rupture.
Open library → Prompts · K–2Big Feelings — K–2
Developmentally tuned prompts for the youngest students. Shorter, simpler language, pitched to what a five-, six-, or seven-year-old can actually hold in the tray.
Open library → PromptsFriendship & Social Connection
For the most common Tier 2 referral in elementary and middle school: the friendship that broke, the group that closed up, the lunch table that got smaller.
Open library → PromptsFamily Dynamics & Conflict
Sibling rivalry, divided loyalties, parental conflict, parentification, blended families. The tray makes the family system visible without requiring the family to be in the room.
Open library →Templates & Documentation
The paperwork side of clinical work. Fillable in the browser, prints clean. Designed for chart review, IEP teams, and supervision.
Sandtray Session Note
Structured note: framework used, polyvagal-coded affect, figures of significance, themes, hypothesis, plan.
Open template → TemplateTreatment Plan Scaffold
SMART goals pre-mapped to sandtray approaches — with objectives, intervention type, progress markers, coordination, and discharge criteria.
Open template → TemplateInformed Consent (Digital Sandtray)
Adult and parent/guardian versions covering session documentation, screenshots, telehealth, data privacy, and FERPA/HIPAA.
Open template →School Counseling Protocols
Brief interventions designed for the realities of school counseling — bell schedules, IEP teams, and ASCA Mindsets & Behaviors. Most run in 15 minutes or less.
15-Minute Tier 2 Sandtray
A complete brief intervention: setup, opening, core activity, closing, and ASCA-aligned documentation. Designed for between-bells work.
Open protocol → ProtocolGroup Sandtray (3–5 Students)
Structured group protocol with turn-taking, witness roles, and a shared closing. For social-skills and friendship groups.
Open protocol → ProtocolRe-Entry After Disruption
For students returning after suspension, hospitalization, or extended absence. A regulation-first protocol that honors the disruption without re-traumatizing.
Open protocol → One-PagerTeacher & Admin Explainer
What the sandtray is, what it isn’t, and what to expect — plain language, printable, designed for the staff lounge or a PLC presentation.
Open & print →✦ The Sandstories Playbook
A premium prompt-card system for school counselors — 100 ASCA-aligned sandtray prompts, organized by clinical theme, with counselor processing guides on every card.
Have a resource you’d like to see? Email Hello@sandstories.app — clinician requests guide what we build next.