Clean Mud Sensory Play

What child doesn’t enjoy ripping up toilet paper? You can imagine the fun my two had doing just that to create our Clean Mud Sensory Play activity.

Continuing our A-Z Sensory Play series we have reached the letter M. We wanted a way of playing with mud without having to leave the house so we created a version of “clean mud” using items from the bathroom.

What Is Needed to Prepare Clean Mud Sensory Play?

To prepare clean mud all you need is a bar of soap, a roll of toilet paper, a grater and warm water – how simple is that!

And here are few other things we used:

• sensory bin
• cookie cutters

Time for preparations!

My son ages tearing toilet roll paper into strips and placing them into a large bowl. I am sure he thought this was the play activity! We used nearly a whole roll and in hindsight we should have used the rest of it.

I then grated soap on top. I decided my son was not ready to use a grater yet but older children would be able to do this step with supervision.

We then poured warm water onto the mixture of toilet paper and soap. The warm water melts the soap. My son used a metal spoon to combine the ingredients until it became a pulp. We then poured the concoction into our green sensory bin along with a few metal cookie cutters.

How to Play with Clean Mud?

The clean mud smells wonderful – a brilliant activity to stimulate the sense of smell. My son got involved straight away with squishing the clean mud between his fingers.

The clean mud feels soft, smooth and can become foamy. It is best to have a tea towel to hand as you will find the clean mud can stick to your fingers.

Once my son had explored the clean mud with his fingers, he set about using the cookie cutters. He used the gingerbread man, rabbit and duck cookie cutter to make indentations in the clean mud. This would have worked better our toilet paper had been ripped into even smaller pieces but my son was happy with the result.

Read Along for a Muddy Day Play!

We read our favorite book about muddy day as we played! It’s a story about friends who race through the countryside to Old Rusty’s farm to rescue the sheep. Little Blue soon comes up with a plan, but will Wide Red mind getting his beloved red paint muddy? And when things go wrong mid-rescue, will the team find another way to bring the sheep to dry land?

Find the book here: United States | Canada | United Kingdom

Learning Opportunities

As they play with clean mud, children work on following skills:

• Development of fine motor skills
• Eye & hand coordination – watching and doing and coordinating these actions.
• Sensory- Development of the sense of touch. Feeling and manipulating objects and moulding clean mud.

Next Activity to Try with Your Toddler

If you are new to sensory play, you might benefit by downloading our free Sensory Play basics guide. Here are few more easy to prepare sensory play ideas popular with kids:

• zero sensory bin
• hair rollers sensory play
• water sensory bin

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