Making mud cakes in the nature area

Children at Daisykins nursery in Rugby were very keen to explore their newly equipped nature area. They quickly found the wooden spoons and saucepans and started filling up their pots and pans with mud. As the children started adding the mud to their pots they talked about making a chocolate cake, one child asked a practitioner for some water as he needed this to add to his bowl.Practitioners supported the children and asked them questions along the way eg is it hot or cold. The well designed mud kitchen has small openings of which the children are able to refer to this as where the food is cooked or a storage area.Children used the weighing scales to measure how much the saucepans weighed, they then went onto looking around the area to see what else they could weigh one child balanced the wooden stepping stones onto the scales as he wanted to see where the red indicator moved to.

The new mud kitchen has been a great success, it has enabled children to develop many areas of their development and it has been great to see the older children working closely with the younger children acting as positive role models.