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:
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:
This is so wonderful! I found your post through the Shine Blog Hop and I’m really glad I did. My daughter has Sensory Processing Disorder (she’s 5) and her therapist usually does activities like this. I never did these when she was younger because she hated them! But, she’s getting better and I don’t want to lose momentum so I’ve been trying to do more at home. This resource will be a big help!
Awesome! So glad you find this helpful and can use it with your daughter! We have many sensory friendly activities on the site if you want to check for additional ideas, just click on “Sensory play” tag on the bottom of any page!
Oh I LOVE clean mud and I haven’t made it for such a long time! This was an awesome reminder. I’ll have to make some for my kiddos!
Thanks for sharing (and for linking up to the #SHINEbloghop).
Wishing you a lovely evening.
xoxo
Clean mud is really fun! 🙂 Thank you for taking the time to stop by! Enjoy the holidays!
How long does it stay for? Could I put it in a bin with a lid and it last for a week or so? My daughter is just getting started with sensory bins so I’m new to all of this and looking for bins that I can reuse for a few weeks at a time!
Kaitlyn, you can keep it for several day. However, if you would like to make sensory bins you can reuse, I would suggest dry fillers like rice or beans. You can find 33 ideas for rice-based sensory play here: Rice Sensory Play Ideas for Kids.