International Mud Day — A day that took me back to my childhood! Making various kinds of dolls with mud from the garden, wading through the overflowing rain water in the streets, making paper boats, walking through a farm in the squishy mud, getting soaked under water pump in the farm and lastly, just having pure fun.What used to be casual activities in my childhood have become “unheard of” activities for most of the children of this generation. In our concrete jungle with limited access to gardens, soil and clay; our well designed and clean apartment communities; lack of time to go to a farm; lack of aptitude to expose our children to the “germs” have all pushed the “mud play” to extinction for this generation. With the disappearance of these activities, we have made a huge vacuum in our children’s sensorial development. Thanks to ECA India (Early Childhood Association India), for reminding us about “International Mud Day”, we had some awesome muddy time! Our lovely team thought through various fun activities for all our children and we were prepared for some muddy mud fun!
International Mud Day — A day that took me back to my childhood! Making various kinds of dolls with mud from the garden, wading through the overflowing rain water in the streets, making paper boats, walking through a farm in the squishy mud, getting soaked under water pump in the farm and lastly, just having pure fun.
- We used this opportunity to kick-start our vegetable patch. All our children sprinkled seeds of various vegetables into the gardening pots and watered them. We can’t wait for these plants to grow. It would be amazing to see the reactions on our kids’ faces as they see these seeds sprout.
- Now, this may be an interesting activity. But, the real fun begins only when we let their hands get really dirty! So, our kids had an opportunity to get their hands muddy with some mud sculpting, mud art and some treasure hunt of “worms” (noodles) in the mud.
We were all really soaked in mud! Then comes our “Akash Ganga”. We opened the valve from the tank above to fill our buckets and this was the ultimate fun for some of our kids. They enjoyed just walking right under it! It was funny when one of the kid simply emptied the water in the bucket and prompted me to open the valve again so that, he could fill the bucket or maybe just get under the water!
- We wrapped it up with a story– “Mud Puddle By Robert Munsch”.
Dirt + Mud + Slurry + Water = Happy & content kiddos!
All-in-all a very eventful, muddy, slimy, wet and FUN celebration that has certainly created some wonderful memories for us!
- One of the newly admitted boys smiled wholeheartedly for the first time and immersed himself in the muddy play today.
- Dropping mud balls into the watery slurry to see them form ripples
- Children sticking their head under high-pressure water from the tank above
- Our ‘under 2-year’ olds, whom we think are delicate and fragile, had a blast in the mud.
