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??
I try to rotate some of our toys and books around the first of each month. I don’t rotate everything, but find that some rotation helps add some fresh energy to the playroom. The kids are usually excited to see toys that have been put away for a few months – the toys almost seem new to them. Also, limiting the number of toys that are out at one time helps the kids focus their creativity on the toys available.
My method for toy rotation is pretty relaxed. I take away toys that are no longer being played with and replace them with toys from storage. When I rotate in the “new” toys, I try to think about what might be happening in the upcoming month – if there are any holidays, special events or themes we’re going to be exploring.
This month, I’ve rotated in some toys related to the outdoors. The weather is just starting to slightly warm up where we live and we are ready to spend more time outside. I’ve also added a few construction materials, as we will be doing some construction play this month.
There are a number of toys that I don’t rotate because they are played with regularly. Our farm animals, fences, barn and chicken coop stay out on the shelf all the time. My 3 year old son is a huge farm addict and plays with them pretty much everyday. I also leave out our open ended blocks, castle pieces and play kitchen. If you’re interested in learning more about the toys we leave out all the time, there is more information in this post.
Next, I rotate the books on the display shelves in my kids’ rooms. The books on the display shelves tend to be the ones we read at night, rather than the ones stacked on nearby shelves, so we all enjoy when they are refreshed every month. This month, I put out some books related to the outdoors and a few of our other favourites that we haven’t read in a while.
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Can you guess what my kids’ favourites might be? My 5 year old daughter grabbed Stuck by Oliver Jeffers first and my 3 year old son chose his two Stick and Stone books. If you have any questions about the toys and books above or if you have any questions about toy rotation, please leave a comment.
The kit included playdough, a few blueberries, a rice and pasta mix, a frying pan and spatula, and some wood butter and maple syrup pieces. I decided to add a few extra accessories from our play kitchen – so the kids would have everything they needed to mix up pancake batter, cook the pancakes and serve them.
I also thought this would be a good opportunity to talk about the ingredients in pancakes and their food sources while we played. Eric Carle’s book, Pancakes, Pancakes provided the perfect segue between pancakes and food sources. I found some free resources on Teach Nutrition that I printed and made into a simple matching game. The kids matched the food to its food source – all of them from farms of course.
The kids really adored this activity. It stayed out all weekend and was consistently played with. My 5 year old daughter asked if we could keep it out forever – lol. When I asked why, she said, “because it smells SOOO good!”
Farm and farm animals are a year-round theme at our house. My 3 year old son loves all things farm, so we do a lot of farm-related activities. Today, I’m sharing a few of our favourites.
1. Small World Farm Sensory Tray
One of our favourite farm activities is to make a big small world tray. My son likes watching YouTube videos of people setting up farm dioramas and they usually use sand as the base. He kept asking for sand so I thought I’d try it. I didn’t have enough Kinetic Sand to fill the whole tray, so I paired it with some plastic grass mats (very easy to rinse off) and some dry corn.
Although it was very messy, the kids also really loved it so I felt the mess was worth it. I had to spend some time at the end straining the corn out of the kinetic sand, but otherwise everything cleaned-up pretty easily.
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2. Farm Sensory Tray – Version 2
We’ve also done another version of a farm small world with a variety of different dry goods. This one had lots of different textures to explore and was less messy.
This tray was very good at representing different areas of a farm and lots of space to make up stories and scenes with the animals.
Dry Goods: Cereal, corn, split peas, ground up cereal, lentils and spaghetti
Grimm’s wood stacking bowls
3. Little Blue Truck Play
The Little Blue Truck series is a favourite in our house. We have many of the books, so I thought it would be fun to set up a little farm landscape where the kids could act out scenes from the book or make up their own stories with their favourite characters. The kids know these books well, so it was fairly easy for them to translate the book into play.
Materials
Great Outdoors Storyboard Starter Pack, Storyboard Trofast Insert, Farm Animal Play Pieces (Eye Spy Club)
Oobleck is one of our favourite messy substances. If you’ve never tried it, you really need to. It’s a suspension, so when you compress it in your hand – it firms up and when you release pressure on it – it drips back into a liquid form. Pretty magical. It’s made of cornstarch and water (so also very easy to make and economical), but if you add some cocoa powder, it looks like mud. You don’t need many accessories for this activity – just some animals to get muddy and a bowl of soapy water to clean them. You can also include sponges, brushes and other tools for scooping and squirting. My 3 year old son’s favourite thing about this activity was the turkey baster. He found sucking up and squirting the water to be hilarious.
One of the best parts of Oobleck is after it dries you, you can use it again. Just add water and it will turn back into mud.
MuddyOobleck Recipe
2 cups cornstarch
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1+ cup of water (I usually have to add a bit more water)
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5. Farm Themed Bath – Washing Vegetables and Fruit
And finally, we love a farm-themed bath. I wanted to try something a bit different, so I decided to use our Yellow Door Education fruits and vegetable stones and cover them in bath paint to make them look dirty. I wasn’t 100% sure how this activity would go, but it turned out fantastic! The kids scrubbed the food clean, painted it again, and repeated on an endless loop. And then the best part – they got so into cleaning that they cleaned the entire bath and surrounding walls! Needless to say, we’ll be doing this again next time the bath needs a clean.
Materials
Yellow Door Education Sensory Sound Eggs, Fruit and Pizza Toppings (Sewing Seeds Play – save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10 and Scholar’s Choice)
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BONUS ACTIVITY: Rainbow Barns Colour Sort & Count
My go-to combination for a very easy sensory activity setup is to take one of our toys and pair it with a sensory mix. The kids love it because it gives the toy a new and fresh feel.
The Guidecraft Barnyard Activity Boxes are a favourite in our house. They are so fun for colour sorting and counting. I set them out with some coloured pasta (from Bulk Barn) and tweezers to make searching for the farm pieces a little more challenging and fun. Of course, the tractor had to join in on the fun. It’s such an easy set up that promotes fine motor skills, colour sorting and counting.
In preparation for Earth Day, we practiced thinking of creative ways we could reuse items. I set up this open ended art and craft activity mainly for my 5 year old daughter, but my 3 year old son also joined in on the fun. They spent hours creating with cardboard, scraps, recycling, broken trinkets and other supplies I found in the basement.
Some of the items I included in our Creation Station were:
cardboard
paper scraps
stickers
ribbons
fabric scraps
buttons
pipecleaners
wood embellishments
corks
broken wheels, fasteners and other pieces
sequins
washi tape
fasteners
recycling pieces (e.g., bubble wrap)
paint
paint sticks
glue
scissors
My daughter’s favourite items items to decorate were empty Grapat Mandala boxes, while my son made a folded piece of cardboard into a barn roof.
New and untraditional materials really seemed to spark creativity. The kids loved this “no rules” creating so much that I think I’m going to find a way to incorporate some of these supplies into our everyday arts and craft supplies.
I joined a loop on Instagram with a “Prehistoric” theme. Originally, I thought it would be a small break from our pond/ Earth Day play, but when I think about it – dinosaurs fit in pretty well with Earth Day themes. What better reminder of how fragile life on the planet can be and then how quickly it can be extinguished.
For this tray, I used our felt Papoose Volcano and Olli Ella Dinos along with a variety of different sensory mixes. The grass is rice and unsweetened coconut that I dyed with food colouring. I just mixed some blue and yellow food colouring, added a splash of vinegar so it would be easier to spread around and poured it into the bowl of coconut. The coconut required more food colouring to turn green than the rice, but the smell of it is amazing and well worth the effort.
The speckled rocks are dry pinto beans, the lava is made from red lentil and the pond and stream is our felt pond piece along with some aquarium gravel. I am new to the concept of using aquarium gravel in sensory play, but i’m loving the colour variation and texture so far. I put a few white lima beans around the river as a river rock bed.
Then I added in some fake vegetation pieces, trees and rocks. I used a small amount of floral foam to hold some of the bunches together. Finally, it was time to add dinos, dino eggs, lizards and bury our Yellow Door Education dinosaur footprint stones.
To add an extra learning element to the activity, I made a Search and Count card for the kids so they could discover and count the various elements. I will include the link here if you’d like to download it.
When we read Pond by Jim LaMarche, I immediately thought it would make a fun activity for the kids. It’s about a boy who finds a former pond area and restores it with friends and family. In return, the healthy pond has a wonderful impact on the boy’s life.
To recreate the pond area, I set up our Tuff Tray and laid down the Wonderie Coral Reef Play Cloth first. Then I added grass mats, stones, sticks and vegetation and poured water over it all. Finally I added the animals, clean recycling, some bowls and scoops.
When the kids saw the tray, they dove right into pond clean-up and enjoyed playing with all the elements of the pond. They did need a little prompting to think of this activity in terms of the book. We haven’t done a lot of book sensory play, so it may be that we just need to practice that way of thinking and do book-related play more often.
The book and activity fit right into our week of pond play and was a great precursor to Earth Day.
We’ll be doing some play on the topic of ponds this week. I think it will tie in nicely with Earth Day coming up on April 22nd.
To start off, we did a pond fizzy (potion) play activity. My kids love activities involving fizzy reactions, so we do them often.
I usually make my own fizzy powder because the kids go through a lot in one activity. My 3 year old tends to dump entire containers of fizzy powder into the water. To manage this impulse, I put the powder in small containers and refill them throughout the activity.
I prefer fizzy powder recipes that use citric acid powder – so you can just add water to create a reaction. However, baking soda and vinegar will give you the same reaction. The recipe is simple and very forgiving. The measurements do not need to be exact. I will usually just eyeball the amounts of each ingredient.
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If you don’t have Bubbling Epsom Salt, but want to still create a long-lasting, bubbling mix – you can use cornstarch. I have more information on making fizzy/ potion powder with cornstarch in this post.
To add something extra to this activity, I made it look like a pond, so we could talk about creatures that live near ponds. I also included some blue and yellow water, so the kids could try some colour mixing. For fine motor work practice, I put out a variety of tools including pipettes, tweezers and scoops.
The kids had a great time with this activity. They loved the added texture of the grass under the water and of course, scooping, mixing and pouring the ingredients. It sparked a lot of conversation about the animals and creatures who live around ponds.
Other Materials
Yello Door Education Rustic Pourers (Sewing Seeds Play – save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Lovevery colour tablets for blue and yellow water, tweezers & pipettes
Here’s a quick glance at some of the other space play we were up to last week.
1 . Space Bath
I often continue the kids’ current play interests into the bath. We love spooky, glow-in-the dark baths and do them often, so our space bath was a fairly simple set up. I put some Glo Pals light-up cubes and glow sticks/ bracelets in the bath and sprinkled some glow-in-the-dark rocks on the bath tray with some cups with strainer holes in the bottom.
Glo Pals Light Up Cubes (Sewing Seeds Play – save with code HOUSEOFPLAY10)
Glow rocks and glow bracelets (Amazon and Walmart)
Lovevery Drip Drop Cups
Bath Caddy (Dollarama)
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2. Space Orbit Ball Run
I thought it would be fun to make a spiralling ball run and use the Grapat Dear Universe planets as the balls, so they looked liked orbiting planets. However, this play activity taught me that ball runs are much more difficult to build than they look.
I had some pretty ambitious ideas for this ball run, that my skills couldn’t match. After an hour and a half, I was happy to have something that at least worked. However, it wasn’t that stable. I don’t recommend this design. I am happy with it for a first try, but there is lots of room to improve. I need to work on my skills.
Despite the shaky build, the kids really enjoyed playing with this and surprisingly didn’t get too discouraged that they needed to rebuild it after every 2-3 runs. I think it would definitely be worth trying this again.
This is really the first year my kids have expressed an interest in space – mostly thanks to the eclipse. I didn’t think I had many space related resources, but found quite a few things once I started looking through the space lens. Here are some of the books we read and enjoyed over the week. They are a combination of ones we had and a few we got from the library.
I also remembered we had a space themed game. The Orchard Toys Rocket Game is really fun. It was a gift from one of their grandma’s. We love Orchard Toys games. They are so fun and easy for my young kids to understand. The video below gives a quick overview.
4. Space Play-Doh Air-Dry Clay Kit
We didn’t get to this activity yet because of sickness and… life. However, it looks wonderful and I’m sure the kids will love it. The “add-in” glitter and sparkles will be very popular. I’m going to save it for a rainy day.
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We had a wonderful time learning about space and I look forward to doing more space-related activities in the future because I learned a lot too! Did you know Pluto is no longer considered a planet? You probably did, lol, but I just caught up on that fact.
My 5 year old daughter is unicorn-obsessed, so of course she wants a unicorn birthday party this year. I thought I would get a head-start on the party favours/goody bags by making some Unicorn Magic Potion kits. Since I’m a sensory mom (is that a thing? i don’t know – lol), I made them myself. Here’s how I did it.
Making potion fizzy powder is very easy. I used a slightly different recipe this time in order to increase the yield and I’m very happy with it. I have another recipe here.
DIY Potion/ Fizzy Powder
2 cups baking soda
1 cup citric acid powder
1 cup cornstarch
I mixed the baking soda and cornstarch together first. Then I added some purple gel food colouring to colour the powder purple. The food colouring step is obviously optional. I did find it difficult to spread the dye out in the powder as the dye drops got trapped in the powder. I ended up mixing it with my hands and smearing the powder between my hands to mix the dye in.
Once the dye was mixed in, I stirred in the citric acid powder. I added the citric acid last to be extra cautious the dye didn’t activate a fizzing reaction. I also added some glitter and unicorn polymer clay slice mix to the potion powder. Again, this is optional.
I don’t think the measurements in this recipe need to be exact. Baking soda and citric acid powder mixed together will make a fizzing reaction when water is added. The cornstarch just prolongs the fizzing. I only had 2 cups of baking soda left, so the cornstarch also allowed me to make more potion powder. For reference, this amount of powder made 20 party favours (with 4 spoonfuls in each small bag).
Part of the fun of making potions is mixing magical objects into the fizzing substance. For potion add-ins I included some purple crushed decorative filler, sequins, resin unicorn and rainbow trinkets and acrylic gems.
I put everything into a bag and added a pipette (for adding water to the powder) and a thank you note with the potion instructions. I will link the thank you note here if you’d like to download it.
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A quick note on AliExpress: You can get the items I bought on AliExpress on Amazon, I just chose to buy them on AliExpress because it’s less expensive and part of the reason for doing a DIY was to save a bit of money.
Everything is packaged and ready to go. Now I just have to organize the rest of the party. lol. If you have any questions, please leave me a comment!
