Nursery World - Enabling Environments: Mud Kitchens

In the run-up to International Mud Day on 29 June, Jan White and
Menna Godfrey make the case for creating a mud kitchen in your setting
and offer advice on how to best approach the task.

Do your children frequently bring you a cup of tea made from soil and water, perhaps with a couple of spoons of sand as sugar? Do you see them making each other hot chocolate, ice cream or a special birthday cake? Do you remember making mud pies yourself?

Mud kitchens provide something quite different to a soil digging patch, while also being much more easily managed. A mud kitchen or cafe includes elements of both the much-loved domestic corner and baking from indoor play, which are then hugely enriched by being outside.

Children play in this way from two years old onwards, often saying that they are making some kind of food; so the idea of a 'kitchen' works well in pre-school contexts. For older children, this may well become more of a 'laboratory' where the scientific exploration goes further and into more detail about how things work.

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