Every kit we build, every specialist we support, and every program we fund reaches a child in a hospital. Healing happens through play.
What We Do
What we do and why it matters.
Smiles from Sarah (SFS) heals children in hospitals by expanding the reach and impact of child life programs and therapeutic play - one play kit, one child life specialist, one hospital program, one family at a time.
Therapeutic Play Kits
Smiles from Sarah creates and delivers therapeutic play kits to Child Life programs. These kits give Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLSs) meaningful tools to help children cope through play.
Designed alongside CCLSs, each kit uses therapeutic play to reduce anxiety, encourage self-expression, and help children cope with medical procedures and hospital stays. Every kit is curated to hand directly to a patient — no assembly required at the bedside — and built to inspire young builders, artists, storytellers, and scientists while offering comfort, connection, and moments of joy.
Creative/Art Projects
These projects are a great way to create a unique kit with drawings, words, and a little imagination.
Uniquely Personal
Help pre-populate journals with prompting words and phrases. This fun, hands-on activity lets you think outside the box and create something unique. Children and teens use the journals to celebrate achievements or moments of joy and gratitude, but also to process tough feelings like sadness, anger, or frustration.
Teamwork Projects
Teamwork makes the dream work! These kits require splitting into two or more teams to prepare items that go into the assembled kits.
Bracelets & Keychains
Creating bracelets and/or keychains together helps with emotional expression and cognitive development, enhancing fine motor skills, and providing sensory stimulation. Emotions can be associated with different beads, or they can spell out words. They’ll also have a little extra to make items for others. When putting together this kit, most of the time will be spent counting beads into bags, so it is a great networking opportunity.
Calming & Relaxing
Sensory Jars are a great calming tool when emotions become overwhelming. The different materials in the sensory jars fall at different speeds, creating a period of relaxation and refocus when shaken. You will assemble kits containing different beads, glitter, and other materials for the children to use to create these jars. Working in groups, you will bag beads and assemble them with the remaining materials for the children to create these jars.
Creativity & Science
Slime is a great multi-purpose outlet for all ages. It allows for self-expression and storytelling but can also be a tool for guided conversations with others about a range of topics. During this activity, children and teens are encouraged to dive into sensory play while being creative and learning about science. Baking soda and contact solution are measured into small containers. When patients mix with glue and other items, magic happens!
Salt & Chalk
Using salt and chalk, children can make "sand art." Salt will be divided into the bowls and swirled with chalk to color. Patients can assign each color to a different emotion, and its quantity can vary depending on how they are feeling. This therapeutic activity promotes fine motor development and emotional expression. To assemble, one team will fill bags of salt, while the other assembles the kits.
Insights & Aspirations
Vision boards are great outlets for all ages. They allow for private reflection but also enable guided conversations with others about a range of topics. Children and teens can create meaningful art while gaining valuable insights into themselves and their aspirations, empowering them to pursue their dreams with confidence and clarity.
Assembly Line Projects
These projects are great for smaller groups with limited time, or as one of multiple projects to ensure all volunteers are included.
Sarah's Favorite
Volcanoes offer opportunities not only for sensory play but also for conversation and an emotional outlet. Child life specialists can use them to help children describe feelings of anger or frustration and things that make them feel like they want to "erupt." Kits include play dough, vinegar, baking soda, mini dinosaurs, and more, giving them everything at their fingertips for this fun activity.
Comfort & Security
Using fabric markers, the child may customize a comforting pillowcase to have close by when feeling stressed, sad, or anxious, especially while going to sleep at night. Safe spaces are important in establishing security. When in the hospital, children may feel like that security has been taken away as they’re thrown into an unfamiliar environment.
Meaningful Conversations
These adorable stuffed toys facilitate meaningful conversations and help children work through their worries. Patients can write anything that is causing them worry on the provided "monster food" and continue to watch their monster grow and manage their worries.
Bracelets & Keychains
Creating bracelets and/or keychains together helps with emotional expression and cognitive development, enhancing fine motor skills, and providing sensory stimulation. Emotions can be associated with different beads, or they can spell out words. They’ll also have a little extra to make items for others. When putting together this kit, most of the time will be spent counting beads into bags, so it is a great networking opportunity.
Creativity & Science
Slime is a great multi-purpose outlet for all ages. It allows for self-expression and storytelling but can also be a tool for guided conversations with others about a range of topics. During this activity, children and teens are encouraged to dive into sensory play while being creative and learning about science. Baking soda and contact solution are measured into small containers. When patients mix with glue and other items, magic happens!
Salt & Chalk
Using salt and chalk, children can make "sand art." Salt will be divided into the bowls and swirled with chalk to color. Patients can assign each color to a different emotion, and its quantity can vary depending on how they are feeling. This therapeutic activity promotes fine motor development and emotional expression. To assemble, one team will fill bags of salt, while the other assembles the kits.
Calming & Relaxing
Sensory Jars are a great calming tool when emotions become overwhelming. The different materials in the sensory jars fall at different speeds, creating a period of relaxation and refocus when shaken. You will assemble kits containing different beads, glitter, and other materials for the children to use to create these jars. Working in groups, you will bag beads and assemble them with the remaining materials for the children to create these jars.
Meaningful Conversations
These adorable stuffed toys facilitate meaningful conversations and help children work through their worries. Patients can write anything that is causing them worry on the provided "monster food" and continue to watch their monster grow and manage their worries.
Creative/Art Projects
Sarah's Favorite
Volcanoes offer opportunities not only for sensory play but also for conversation and an emotional outlet. Child life specialists can use them to help children describe feelings of anger or frustration and things that make them feel like they want to "erupt." Kits include play dough, vinegar, baking soda, mini dinosaurs, and more, giving them everything at their fingertips for this fun activity.
Comfort & Security
Using fabric markers, the child may customize a comforting pillowcase to have close by when feeling stressed, sad, or anxious, especially while going to sleep at night. Safe spaces are important in establishing security. When in the hospital, children may feel like that security has been taken away as they’re thrown into an unfamiliar environment.
Uniquely Personal
Help pre-populate journals with prompting words and phrases. This fun, hands-on activity lets you think outside the box and create something unique. Children and teens use the journals to celebrate achievements or moments of joy and gratitude, but also to process tough feelings like sadness, anger, or frustration.
Insights & Aspirations
Vision boards are great outlets for all ages. They allow for private reflection but also enable guided conversations with others about a range of topics. Children and teens can create meaningful art while gaining valuable insights into themselves and their aspirations, empowering them to pursue their dreams with confidence and clarity.
Deliver Smiles
We coordinate collection or shipment of the finished kits, putting them in the hands of child life specialists who use them to support patients and families.
Build with Purpose
As your group assembles kits, they'll learn how therapeutic play helps hospitalized children cope and why child life specialists are so essential to that care.
We Handle the Details
You get a full supply list, playbook, and step-by-step instructions, making it easy for your team to organize a meaningful, hands-on service project.
Plan Together
Tell us about your group, event, timeline, and number of participants. Based on your goals, we'll recommend the best therapeutic play kit projects and how many to build.
Assembly Projects
These projects are great for smaller groups with limited time, or as one of multiple projects to ensure all volunteers are included.
Sarah's Favorite
Volcanoes offer opportunities not only for sensory play but also for conversation and an emotional outlet. Child life specialists can use them to help children describe feelings of anger or frustration and things that make them feel like they want to "erupt." Kits include play dough, vinegar, baking soda, mini dinosaurs, and more, giving them everything at their fingertips for this fun activity.
Comfort & Security
Using fabric markers, the child may customize a comforting pillowcase to have close by when feeling stressed, sad, or anxious, especially while going to sleep at night. Safe spaces are important in establishing security. When in the hospital, children may feel like that security has been taken away as they’re thrown into an unfamiliar environment.
Assembly & Teamwork Projects
Teamwork makes the dream work! These kits require splitting into two or more teams to prepare items that go into the assembled kits.
Bracelets & Keychains
Creating bracelets and/or keychains together helps with emotional expression and cognitive development, enhancing fine motor skills, and providing sensory stimulation. Emotions can be associated with different beads, or they can spell out words. They’ll also have a little extra to make items for others. When putting together this kit, most of the time will be spent counting beads into bags, so it is a great networking opportunity.
Creativity & Science
Slime is a great multi-purpose outlet for all ages. It allows for self-expression and storytelling but can also be a tool for guided conversations with others about a range of topics. During this activity, children and teens are encouraged to dive into sensory play while being creative and learning about science. Baking soda and contact solution are measured into small containers. When patients mix with glue and other items, magic happens!
Salt & Chalk
Using salt and chalk, children can make "sand art." Salt will be divided into the bowls and swirled with chalk to color. Patients can assign each color to a different emotion, and its quantity can vary depending on how they are feeling. This therapeutic activity promotes fine motor development and emotional expression. To assemble, one team will fill bags of salt, while the other assembles the kits.
Calming & Relaxing
Sensory Jars are a great calming tool when emotions become overwhelming. The different materials in the sensory jars fall at different speeds, creating a period of relaxation and refocus when shaken. You will assemble kits containing different beads, glitter, and other materials for the children to use to create these jars. Working in groups, you will bag beads and assemble them with the remaining materials for the children to create these jars.
Meaningful Conversations
These adorable stuffed toys facilitate meaningful conversations and help children work through their worries. Patients can write anything that is causing them worry on the provided "monster food" and continue to watch their monster grow and manage their worries.
Creative/Art Projects
These projects are a great way to think outside the box and create something unique.
Uniquely Personal
Help pre-populate journals with prompting words and phrases. This fun, hands-on activity lets you think outside the box and create something unique. Children and teens use the journals to celebrate achievements or moments of joy and gratitude, but also to process tough feelings like sadness, anger, or frustration.
Insights & Aspirations
Vision boards are great outlets for all ages. They allow for private reflection but also enable guided conversations with others about a range of topics. Children and teens can create meaningful art while gaining valuable insights into themselves and their aspirations, empowering them to pursue their dreams with confidence and clarity.
Smiles from Sarah creates and delivers therapeutic play kits to Child Life programs. These kits give Certified Child Life Specialists (CCLSs) meaningful tools to help children cope through play.
Designed alongside CCLSs, each kit uses therapeutic play to reduce anxiety, encourage self-expression, and help children cope with medical procedures and hospital stays. Every kit is curated to hand directly to a patient — no assembly required at the bedside — and built to inspire young builders, artists, storytellers, and scientists while offering comfort, connection, and moments of joy.
Therapeutic Play Kits
Bedside Volcano
Play-Doh, vinegar, baking soda, and dinosaurs turn big feelings like frustration into something to safely "erupt."
Bravery Beads
Beaded bracelets and keychains build fine motor skills and let patients assign emotions or words to each bead they choose.
Calming Sensory Jar
Shakeable jars of beads and glitter give overwhelmed patients a built-in moment to pause, refocus, and relax.
Creative Journals
Pre-populated with prompts, giving patients a place to process their feelings and celebrate wins.
Magic Slime
A hands-on science activity that opens the door to guided conversations while sneaking in a lesson in chemistry.
Safe Space Pillowcase
Patients customize a pillowcase with fabric markers, creating comfort and security in an unfamiliar environment.
Sand/Salt Art
Colored salt, tied to different emotions, becomes a layered piece of art and a fine-motor exercise in one.
Vision Board
Space for private reflection or guided conversation, helping patients imagine a future beyond their diagnosis.
Worry Monster
Patients write down their worries on "monster food" and watch their monster — and their sense of control — grow.
The kits have been amazing and a true game changer in the activities we ... provide our patients and the therapeutic interventions we ... have with our patients.
- Child Life Services Manger, Children's National
The kits have been amazing and a true game changer in the activities we ... provide our patients and the therapeutic interventions we ... have with our patients.
- Child Life Services Manager, Children's National
I am so grateful for ... the impact that [SFS] kits have had on my practice and ... the patients I have worked with.
- Kerry Young, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia
SFS has had an incredible impact on the child life team ... and the families we support. The activity kits ... are easy to navigate, therapeutic in their design, and so fun!
- Samm Wilkens, Children's National
Smiles from Sarah Days
Smiles from Sarah Days are special events that celebrate Child Life while bringing the healing power of play to children and families throughout the hospital. Partnering with hospital teams and volunteers, we create meaningful experiences that spread joy, foster connection, and reach even more patients.
As SFS grows, we look forward to expanding SFS Days to more hospital partners — creating even more opportunities for children to smile, play, and heal.
Every March, Smiles from Sarah brings SFS Day to life at Children's National in Washington, DC. For one special day, the hospital atrium transforms into a hub of creativity and laughter, filled with interactive activities and kit-building stations.
More than 100 children connect with our 20+ volunteers and the incredible Child Life team, and we get to witness smiles and healing first-hand.
Child Life Symposium
Our work doesn't stop at donations. We invest in the people who make therapeutic play possible.
Following the success of our inaugural Child Life Symposium, Smiles from Sarah is committed to making this an annual tradition. Each year, child life specialists from our hospital partners come together to share ideas, explore new approaches to therapeutic play, and strengthen relationships — then return home inspired, with new tools and perspectives to serve children and families better.
Thank you so much for the SFS Child Life Symposium. I am incredibly honored to have been a part of these two days and cannot wait for continued events like this! I love your mission and the way you not only want to support patients but also us! — Child Life Specialist
Thank you so much for the SFS Child Life Symposium. I am incredibly honored to have been a part of these two days and cannot wait for continued events like this! I love your mission and the way you not only want to support patients but also us!
- Child Life Specialist
Child life specialists go above and beyond every day — often in ways that go unseen. Our Goes the Extra Smile Recognition Program exists to change that.
This program celebrates child life specialists who make a lasting, positive impact on patients and families. Whether it's a small moment or a memory that lasts a lifetime, we want to hear about it. Your stories help us spotlight the incredible work child life specialists do every day — and inspire others to do the same. Congratulations to all the child life specialists across our hospital partners who have received this special recognition!
Know a child life specialist who goes the extra smile? Recognize them today and help us celebrate their extraordinary contributions.
Recognize a Child Life Specialist
Do you know a child life specialist who goes the extra smile? Tell us their story.
A quiet moment of comfort. A memory a family never forgot. Whatever it was, it deserves to be celebrated — and your recognition helps us spotlight the people doing this work every day.
Child life specialists go above and beyond every day — often in ways that go unseen. Our Goes the Extra Smile Recognition Program exists to change that.
This program celebrates child life specialists who make a lasting, positive impact on patients and families. Whether it's a small moment or a memory that lasts a lifetime, we want to hear about it. Your stories help us spotlight the incredible work child life specialists do every day — and inspire others to do the same. Congratulations to all the child life specialists across our hospital partners who have received this special recognition!
Know a child life specialist who goes the extra smile? Recognize them today and help us celebrate their extraordinary contributions.
Goes the Extra Smile Recognition Program
Child life specialists go above and beyond every day — often in ways that go unseen. Our Goes the Extra Smile Recognition Program exists to change that by giving families and colleagues a way to name and share that work.
Since launching, the program has recognized Certified Child Life Specialists across every one of our hospital partners — proof that this kind of care isn't the exception at any one hospital; it's the standard we're funding everywhere we work. Congratulations to every child life specialist who's received this special recognition so far.
Do you know a specialist who goes the extra smile? Tell us their story.
Know a child life specialist who goes the extra smile?
Recognize them today and help us celebrate their extraordinary contributions.
Achieving Growth
Connect with Purpose
Smiles from Sarah delivers therapeutic play kits to children in hospitals.
Each kit—designed for Certified Child Life Specialists—helps young patients cope, express themselves, and heal through play. From art projects to building activities to science experiments, our kits inspire creativity and connection during challenging times.
These projects are great for smaller groups with limited time, or as one of multiple projects to ensure all volunteers are included.
Assembly Focused Projects
These projects are great for smaller groups with limited time, or as one of multiple projects to ensure all volunteers are included.
Assembly Focused Projects
Bedside Volcanos (Sarah's Favorite!)
Volcanos present the opportunity for not only sensory play but for conversation and emotional outlet. They can be used to describe feelings of anger or frustration and things that make us feel like we want to "erupt." Kits include: Play Doh, vinegar, baking soda, mini dinosaurs and more, allowing them to have everything at their fingertips for this fun activity.
Safe Space Pillow Cases
Using fabric markers, the child may customize a comforting pillowcase to have close by when feeling stressed, sad, or anxious, especially while going to sleep at night. Safe spaces are important in establishing security. When in the hospital, children may feel like that security has been taken away as they’re thrown into an unfamiliar environment.
Assembly Focused Projects
These projects are great for smaller groups with limited time, or as one of multiple projects to ensure all volunteers are included.
Assembly & Teamwork Projects
Bravery Beads
Creating bracelets and/or keychains together helps with emotional expression and cognitive development, enhancing fine motor skills, and providing sensory stimulation. Emotions can be associated with different beads, or they can spell out words. They’ll also have a little extra to make items for others. When putting together this kit, most of the time will be spent counting beads into bags, so it is a great networking opportunity.
Calming Sensory Jars
Sensory Jars are a great calming tool when emotions become overwhelming. The different materials in the sensory jars fall at different speeds, creating a period of relaxation and refocus when shaken. You will assemble kits containing different beads, glitter, and other materials for the children to use to create these jars. Working in groups, you will bag beads and assemble with the remaining materials for the children to create these jars.
Magic Slime
Slime is a great multi-purpose outlet for all ages. It allows for self-expression and storytelling but can also be a tool for guided conversations with others about a range of topics. During this activity, children and teens are encouraged to dive into sensory play while being creative and learning about science. Baking soda and contact solution are measured into small containers. When patients mix with glue and other items, magic happens!
Worry Monsters
These adorable stuffed toys facilitate meaningful conversation and help children work through their worries. Patients can write anything that is causing them worry on the provided "monster food" and continue to watch their monster grow and manage their worries.
Sand (Salt/Chalk) Art
Using salt and chalk, children can make “sand art.” Salt will be divided into the bowls and swirled with chalk to color. Each color can be assigned a different emotion, and its quantity can vary depending on how the child is feeling. This therapeutic play activity promotes fine motor development and emotional expression. To assemble, one team will fill bags of salt, while the other assembles the kits.
Teamwork makes the dream work! These kits require splitting into two or more teams to prepare items that go into the assembled kits.
Creative / Art Projects
Vision Boards
Vision boards are great outlets for all ages. They allow for private reflection but also enable guided conversations with others about a range of topics. Children and teens can create meaningful art while gaining valuable insights into themselves and their aspirations, empowering them to pursue their dreams with confidence and clarity.
Creative Journals
Help pre-populate journals with prompting words and phrases. This fun, hands-on activity lets you think outside the box and create something unique. Children and teens use the journals to celebrate achievements or moments of joy and gratitude, but also to process tough feelings like sadness, anger, or frustration.
