5 Mud Kitchen Play Ideas Your Kids Will Love!

A mud kitchen is a great addition to the garden for the kids. It can provide hours of imaginative play, encourage them to play both alone and with siblings or you, it encourages them to get closer to nature and learn to explore their surroundings. Free play is probably the most popular way of using a mud kitchen but if you wanted to create a play setup I have 5 mud kitchen play ideas that your kids will love.

Equipment List

Just before we get into the play ideas, here’s a quick checklist of play equipment which will come in really useful for any activity:

• Bowls
• Watering cans
• Whisks
• Wooden Spoons
• Plastic cups
• Juice bottles
• Tea set
• Tea strainer
• Sieve
• Pots and Pans
• Plastic Jars
• Jam jars
• Pestle and Mortar
• Jugs
• Spatula
• Cup Cake Cases 
• Funnels 
• Chalkboard
• Chalk
• Measuring Cups
• Scales
• Old Calpol syringes
• Flowerpots

Mud Kitchen Play Ideas

Baking Mudpies and Mud Cakes

This is a really simple play idea and you can choose a wide variety of kitchen items to bring outside to incorporate too. The obvious ingredient you will need is some mud (soil or compost is also fine). You can then provide additional “ingredients” such as flowers, leaves, petals, stones, seeds, twigs and grass. If you have the time you could place these into labelled pots so your child can select what they need and encourage them to recognise the words that go with the ingredients. Alternatively, you could make this into a little foraging hunt and ask them to go and discover all of the ingredients themselves whilst on a walk or around your garden.

Provide them with cupcake holders, baking trays, muffin trays, whisks, spoons, bowls etc to allow them to act out the process of baking a cake. Don’t forget to “pre-heat the oven” and set a timer too.

Fairy Juice

This is one of my boy’s favourite activities and it is so simple. Take some old clean jam jars, fill them with water, add food colouring plus edible glitter, cake toppings, grass, flowers, leaves and so on and voila! You have a selection of fairy juices that you can sell in your garden cafe/bar. Allow your children to mix the juices, measure out the quantities, pour them, experiment with colours and extra ingredients as this will all add to the fun and the learning process. For slightly older children, grab a blackboard (if your mud kitchen doesn’t have one) and ask them to come up with names for their drinks and a price list.

Potion Making

This activity can be a combination of the first 2 activities listed. Provide ingredients for the potions, provide adequate mixing tools and let your children use their imaginations. For an extra sensory boost why not provide them with some herbs and spices from the kitchen to add into their concoctions?

Herbal Tea

For this activity, you will need a little tea set, water, garden herbs, tea strainer and petals or flowers. Let your kids experiment with the aromas they get from the chosen herbs, let them choose which they like the best, ask them to describe the scent, ask them to rub the leaves in their fingers to see how strong it can be and then compare this to when it is soaked in the water. The flowers and petals can be added to make the tea look a little more pretty. Just like with the fairy juice, you could also set them up with a chalkboard to list make and price.

Make Your Own Play Food

There are many sets we can purchase online and in shops that will provide all you need for your mud kitchen but how about making your own play food with the kids? All you will need is a variety of stones, fir cones, sticks and some paint. You could ask them what the stones could be turned into (bread, pastries etc), what the sticks look like (chocolate, breadsticks etc) and how they could turn them into play food. This is great fun to do together and will really get their creative juices flowing.

Play ideas for mud kitchens are so much fun to come up with. Do you have any favourites to add to the list?

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