Introduction
Right from the start we’ve been campaigning to encourage mud play and play with natural materials in the every day lives of children.
Outdoor Hub
Muddy Faces loves mud!
Liz Edwards, Muddy Faces director (pictured, having her face mud-painted by her son), and Jan White, Natural Play, identified that very few settings were facilitating play with natural resources and hardly any settings had mud kitchens.
So we decided to change this….
.... and have been running a Mud Campaign since 2011, promoting play with natural resources and, in particular, mud, ever since.
Jan wrote the content of Making a Mud Kitchen and Liz added photos and designed the book. Muddy Faces then printed and distributed 18,000 free copies of the Making a Mud Kitchen book. In addition there have now been over 20,000 downloads of the book from our website, and it’s been translated into many different languages. In 2019 we printed our 2nd edition of the Mud Kitchen book.
Jan and Liz are over the moon with the success of the campaign! Now you can see mud kitchens in most Early Years settings and many primary schools; you can go on mud kitchen workshops; read a variety of books, and articles in magazines are common.
We continue to run this campaign through provision of resources and promoting involvement with International Mud Day on the 29th of June each year, through our e-newsletters and online activities.