Welcome to the mud café the best opportunity to feed a child’s natural curiosity and one of the best resources to encourage children to play outside.
The menu could offer mud pie, leaves and gravel cupcakes, pebble stew and twig soup!
Resource the area with a quality range of messy play receptacles from sieves and spoons to jugs and cups.
Activities are a great early introduction to science and maths.
While mixing up a mud pie, children work out how to pretend to feed five children and how many trays will they need. Make sure you offer plenty of old baking trays and cake tins as they will probably want to feed the whole nursery.
A mud kitchen helps to develop communication, physical and mathematical skills and is shown to improve memory. Roleplay collaboration and cooperation providing open-ended play are great methods to build self-esteem and confidence and are ideal for enhancing cognitive skills.
A mud kitchen is a great area to plant a vegetable patch or herb pots close by so children link where food comes from.
A blackboard so children can draw up a pretend menu and wooden stumps to sit upon or picnic blanket and cushions are all essential equipment too.
You could put up bird feeders and bird boxes nearby involving toddlers in feeding nature and local hedgehogs that may visit your nursery garden can be extremely rewarding.
The kitchen doesn’t have to be expensive, perfect or pristine as it won’t be for long!
You could use bricks as posts, and an old shelf on the top or old palettes or crates will suffice as a kitchen. Staff and parents may have old cooking utensils and pots and pans the children can have for free to play with.
Essential ingredients for the area are topsoil, sand, water, leaves, sticks, pine cones and gravel. The children can make a variety of concoctions which they can reuse.
Bon appétit!
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