Mud Kitchen Afternoons

If you’re living in a Charlotte Mason world and hit your lessons hard in the morning, chances are your afternoons are free. This is both amazing and challenging. We’ve got time to run errands, complete chores, free read, and play – but sometimes my kids need a little kickstart for their imaginations to flourish. This blog post is part of a series called Afternoons, where I hope to answer some frequent questions I receive such as … “If you are finished by lunchtime – what do you do all afternoon?”

Even if you only have a little outdoor space, a mud kitchen could be the perfect place for your kids to spend their afternoons. Your kitchen can be super simple or extra fancy depending on your family, budget + the ages of your children. However you choose to design it, make it work for your family.

For our family, we’ve chosen to go the super simple route. We only have a few buckets, measuring cups + spoons in a designated area of the yard. And to be perfectly honest, our mud kitchen isn’t even that muddy! Our supplies are housed under big pine trees so the “ingredients” usually consist of pine needles, twigs, leaves and dried grasses. The kids use big boulders in that area as tabletops or stove tops so we haven’t built or bought anything structured.

If you don’t have huge boulders lying around and would like a small mud kitchen area – Lindsay, from the Lean Green Bean, outlined instructions to build your own. There are also nice Etsy.

Once you’ve got the layout down, it’s time to get cooking! Here are links to a few of our favorite mud kitchen supplies:

wooden spoons measuring cups saucepans plates buckets mixing bowls stock pot mugs