We don’t have a fancy mud kitchen (although I would love one), but I still wanted to give my kids the mud kitchen experience. Mud kitchens have to be up there with sandboxes for one of the original sensory experiences.
I put together this mud kitchen very inexpensively. I found some old milk crates and a piece of plywood in the garage for the counter. Then I went through our pots, pans, utensils and bath toys in our house and pulled out anything that wasn’t being used anymore or looked like fun. The soil is left over from a Christmas planter arrangement and the only things I really needed to buy were the drink dispenser water jug and food stones.
We’ve been using this setup for a few years now and while it isn’t fancy, it works great and the kids love it. I’d also easy to put away and store in the garage when we’re not using it.
You only really need dirt and water to have some mud kitchen fun, but there are a few accessories that we find add some extra excitement to our play.
Favourite Mud Kitchen Accessories
1. Drink Dispenser filled with water. Ours is a glass one from Canadian Tire. I thought glass would be easier to keep clean, but there are acrylic options if you’re concerned about it breaking.
2. Green Toys Tea Set and Stacking Cups. Green Toys makes such great toys for the outdoors. These things are indestructible.
3. Squeeze Bottles from Dollarama. I have ended up with a bunch of these because when friends come over, everyone wants one of these squeeze bottles. The plastic has the perfect flexibility for little hands to squeeze.
4. Empty Spice Containers – save your empty spice containers! They are so fun for filling with dirt, water, old spices, anything. They give the kids a sense of real cooking.
5. Spice Box. This is new to us this year and the kids have been loving it. You can fill it with spices, potion powder, Oobleck, dried leaves, flowers, anything you can think of. It’s very durable and cleans easily, although I do store it inside because I want to use it for indoor play as well.
6. Yellow Door Stones – the one splurge in our Mud Kitchen and they are totally worth it. We have the Fruits, Pizza Toppings, Breads of the world and Sensory Sound Eggs and they are all wonderful. We leave them outside all year and they still look new. Mine are from Sewing Seeds Play (save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10) and Scholars Choice.
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I’d love to know, what are your favourite mud kitchen accessories??