In an Emergent Curriculum model, we often try to use the children’s interests as a way to lead into new areas of play and creativity. We recently set up a provocation that involved dyed mud displayed in a way that invited the children to create something colorful and beautiful with messy, sloppy mud. I was delighted to see the children show excitement in this activity right away! Ronin, Adelynn, and Dominic all reached for the paint brushes and began creating.

When I asked Ronin what he thought about this activity, he responded, “Maybe we should add more mud!” and took the initiative of heading to the dig pit with a shovel and delivering some dirt to the yellow mud paint bowl.

Adelynn focused on her budding skill of categorizing colors and let us know, “I’m making black!” then added, “Look at mud. My mud pictures!”

As they continued to paint, I saw no stopping point for them, so I decided to provide some extensions. I rolled out a big, long, piece of white paper on the Block Deck and relocated the mud paints. The children followed right along, sprawled out across the ground and started using bigger body movements to expand their painting.

I silently added some more natural materials from around the yard, and the children began to follow along and collect some as well. Pretty soon we had mud, soil, leaves, flowers, sticks, lettuce, and stones to add to our collage. I put on The Four Seasons for some inspiring, nature-themed background music and the children began to work. The materials weren’t sticking to the mud paint as well as we’d hoped, so we chose to add some glue. Ronin suggested that we make it brown like mud, so we added some paint, and then Adelynn chose to mix in some dirt and some mud paint.

The children continued to work and work throughout the rest of the day, and even into the next morning, until we collectively felt that we’d reached a stopping point. We proudly displayed the children’s hard work on the wall in the classroom to reflect on as they continue to play and learn.

In continuing our work with recipes and mud, the children have been making lots of creations in the Mud Kitchen. Children playing through their interests and actively construct the deeper understandings of the things in their world is one of my favorite things to witness. As they played as the days passed by, you could see their collaboration becoming smoother and their creations becoming more complicated. The children would work together to develop different roles within their games, with some children cooking, some serving, and some eating. They began to mention more ingredients and their creations began to take many different shapes such as “hot cocoa,” “coffee,” “pie,” “soup,” etc.

Fun fact: as an educator, I passionately prefer to leave pretend food out of my classroom. Many teachers love to include fake food, as it seems to encourage pretend play and imagination. I find, however, that in the absence of pretend food, children will still engage in imaginative kitchen play, but will do so on a much deeper level. They exercise their creativity and resourcefulness by finding loose parts to use as the food they need, and there is no limit to their imaginative abilities. In a typical play kitchen, the apple will always be an apple. In our mud kitchen, our mud becomes cocoa, coffee, pie, soup, and more. This limitless exercise of their imaginative abilities actively hones the children’s symbolic representation skills — an extremely important prerequisite for literacy, for instance. In this search for pretend ingredients, the children are also much more likely to handle natural materials (rather than synthetics, such as plastic foods), providing them with richer sensorial learning as they grow and develop.

Back to our kitchen: while I typically try to stay away from adult-guided crafts and prefer to leave the creativity to the children, every so often I find a place in which a craft makes sense. In order to encourage some deeper kitchen play and allow for more exciting pretending, I invited the children to make chef’s hats with me. I showed them a picture of what a chef’s hat looks like and provided them some white paper strips and white tape. We worked together to make a tall hat for anyone interested and grabbed our painting aprons to complete our costumes. The children wore these until they fell apart and it proved to be such a fun addition to our pretending!

As I continued to observe the children in their kitchen play, I decided to ask some questions. Each time the children made a kitchen concoction, I asked them how they did it and wrote it down. When I had collected a few recipes, we worked together to transcribe them onto paper in recipe format (again, “ingredients” and “instructions”). The children had spaces to draw their ingredients and even trace the letters in their name if they were interested, on our always-continuing quest toward personal name recognition. In working on these recipes, they showcased their growing understandings of numeracy, symbolism and literacy, as well as their growing creativity and focus. Here are just a few examples of such work:

Burrito Recipe by Chef Berkeley:
Ingredients
- Leaf put in
- Mud pile
- More leaves
- More mud piles

Mud Pie Recipe by Chef Ronin:
Ingredients
- 5 scoops of mud
- 10 leaves
- 10 scoops of water
- 10 rocks
Instructions
”I get a scooping pan and I scoop things up and I flip them over, just like my mommy does that.”

Soup Recipe by Chef Miah:
Ingredients
- 2, 4, 6 mud
- 2 water
- More water from a pot

Mud Pie Recipe by Chef Lukas:
Ingredients
- Oranges
- 2 melons
- 3 sugar
- 3 cups of food
- 4 1/2 of sugar
- 3 cups of mud

We’ve compiled these recipes, laminated them for protection, and bound them in a book that now lives in our mud kitchen for whenever anyone feels like following a recipe! The children are so proud to see their hard work validated and displayed, and kept for future use!

Welcome, Berkeley!

Lastly, I want to welcome our newest friend, Berkeley! Berkeley has spent one week with us so far and will be here full time going forward, finally rounding out our Olive Branch group! She has fit right in with these children so quickly and we already love having her around so much. Her strong language abilities and inspiring creative processes will fit right in with our wonderful group of children. Please say hello to Berkeley and her family if you catch them in the mornings or afternoons!

More Mud

Welcome, Berkeley!