5 Ways to Enhance Your Mud Kitchen this Autumn

Autumn is a wonderful season, full of so many learning opportunities for children as they connect with nature. This blog posts explores 5 ways you can easily enhance your mud kitchen this autumn to make the most of the season. Autumn provides us with many treasures that can make it fun as we explore, play and learn in the mud kitchen.

Mud Kitchen Leaflet

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1.  Add autumnal loose parts to the mud kitchen

Autumn provides lots of natural loose parts that can provide open-ended learning opportunities for children as they use their imagination in play. Here are some examples of things you can collect:

• Acorns

• Conkers

• Different types and colours of leaves

• Twigs and sticks

• Chestnuts

• Helicopter seeds

• Fir Cones

A top tip for displaying them is to put them in open bowls or baskets so that the children can see what is inside.

Loose Parts Play More Than Just a Fad Webinar Recording

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2. Add balancing scales

Balancing scales are a great addition to the mud kitchen. Supporting children to develop an early mathematical understanding of weight and making comparisons; without needing to have developed their numerical understanding yet. Providing lots of opportunities for children to develop a rich mathematical language alongside peers and adults support learning and developing. And with all your autumn treasures you will have lots of things to compare of different weights, shapes and sizes to encourage children’s critical thinking and problem solving.

3. Mud kitchen recipes

Support children’s early literacy and mathematical development through having some special mud kitchen recipe cards designed for using in autumn. These cards have been developed and presented in different ways to support children in phase 2 or 3 phonics; and early mathematical skills e.g. number recognition or counting practise.

Crunchy Conker Cake

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4. Seasonal vegetables and Fruit

Add seasonal vegetables, such as pumpkins, butternut squashes, crab apples and blackberries to the mud kitchen. Alongside safety knifes so that the children can explore cutting them up and adding them to their recipes.

5. Embrace the rain and dampness!

Along with warm autumn sunny days, we can also experience some lovely very damp and wet autumn days. Consider add a water butt or some kind of vessel that can collect the rain water each day (remember to empty at the end of the day to avoid legionnaires). And jugs and cylinders so that children can begin to measure, and mix in lots of water in their play.

We Love Autumn…

Today whilst walking in the woods I was reminded of the natural beauty and majestic nature of autumn. Autumn has always had a special part in my heart and soul, a time of the year that I find uplifting, exciting and enjoyable. A brisk walk in the autumn air, as the leaves, acorns and conkers fall around you. A changing landscape of colour and regeneration all around you. A chance to take a deep breath pause and just take in the world that is so rapidly changing around you and appreciate the wonderful world that we can see and the unique connection we all have with nature. Just spending 30 minutes outside a week is said to improve our well-being and I don’t know about you but being outside to quote a good friend “blows away the cobwebs in our souls!” – that nature connection is not just a personal one but also a spiritual connection.

The complexity of this incredible world around us, like the way trees know to drop their leaves, to reserve the limited energy they will get from the sun in the cold winter months, in order to regrow and stay alive in the coming years. The way nature is forever changing around us and easily taken for granted or not understood. Autumn is also an exciting time to for children and a real opportunity to connect with nature, we love to collect conkers, acorns and leaves just like us Early Years Practitioners. I couldn’t help but, on my walk, today collect a few conkers, I think it is ingrained in us to do so to make the most of it.

After all conkers are a wonderful free resource for early years practitioners. From using conkers as loose parts, to tuff trays full of them for filling emptying, to using them for mathematics activities matching numbers to amount or conker rolling painting. There are just so many opportunities for that one conker! I personally love them as natural loose parts in the small-world and mathematics areas as I always think children find something amazing and incredible to do with them.

For example, I remember one child who spent hours engrossed in conker play, who had collected kitchen roll tubes from the art area and his conkers and he explored dropping them through the tubes, standing the tube down and seeing how many he could fit in what would happen if he picked the tube up and so much more. There were high levels of engagement, involvement, problem-solving, application of mathematical skills, working together with others as more children joined him and developing his ideas as they poked sticks through the tubes to see what happened next. As well as building upon his trajectory schema of learning, this child loved to drop things and watch things full and this supported his schema of learning.

Over my many years of working with young children I have been humbled by there understanding of the seasons, but have always found that Autumn just has a really special spark in them. I remember one child, many years ago, who thought “the sky was falling! The world is going to end!” because acorns, conkers and leaves were falling of the trees in the nursery garden. Obviously, we followed this the only way possible by reading the book ‘Chicken Licken’ which became a nursery favourite and doing many activities exploring the season of autumn; for weeks and weeks on end as this little boy and his interest grew and grew and was infectious to all of his friends around him.

But more then this autumn is also a magical time to see the world through children’s eyes. Last year whilst collecting coloured leaves with a group of children to make a physical pictogram on the floor outside, looking at numbers, sorting, colour, more and less and so on. I posed the question to a group of two to four year olds, “Why are the leaves falling of the trees?” To which one 3 year old replied, “Because it is autumn and the trees need to breath!” What an incredible insight and poetic way of putting it and it is very true in a way, the leaves drop in order to allow the tree to have the energy to live.

As people such as Richard Louv talk about a nature deficit and the fact that children are becoming more and more disconnected with nature, for example, many children could not identify trees by leaves anymore. It is a dying art, we do not know the trees around us, even me on my forest school training who loves nature and being outside, this is something I tremendously struggle with. But I always think autumn is a great time to explore this with the children. Take out some ID cards, match the leaves to the picture cards, sort them, look at size, look in detail at the veins on leaves as you do leave rubbings and printing.

A top tip I have when leaf printing is to use cotton buds on the back as you will not end up with to much paint and get a wonderful clear print of all the veins and details of a leaf. Other ideas, are to take your magnifying glasses with you and draw natural sketches with children. I think some of my happiest most memorable experiences with children that I have cared for has simply been, playing with the leaves outside in autumn. Sweeping them up, making pretend bonfires, throwing them in the air, repeating, singing songs around our bonfire or having tea outside around our bonfire. Simply magical times we have had together!

We hope you all have a magical and lovely autumn, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. We are running a webinar ‘Nature Connection and Well-Being in the Early Years on Wednesday 14th October 2020 at 7:30pm and you can click here to book. Or we are running the same webinar again on 21st November 2020 at 2pm and you can click here to book.