Many of you may have noticed the kids are getting pretty muddy these days!
At the primary location, it was an unexpected thrill to go on our playground and find a pond in the hole the children have been digging for the last few weeks. The digging of the hole has been quite the experience, completely navigated by the children.
The adults have offered supervision and guidelines around the use of tools and how to share the space with many children at once but overall they have acted more as observers and let the children run the project! You can imagine the children’s excitement when they found their hole is now full of water allowing for an entirely new texture of mud to work with.
The children are learning so much and being so creative in finding ways to incorporate the mud into their play! This amount of mud is a unique opportunity. Needless to say, this is not a good time to send your child to school in their finest clothing (really, it is probably never a good idea to do that). The easiest way to clean up after playing in the mud is with the hose!
Ideally, children will have rain gear to wear outside (both for the rain and for the mud) and it is essential that each child has a pair of rain boots, preferably that live at school but at least a pair that is coming back and forth each day. It would also be helpful if each child could bring a towel, that way after they hose off, they can also dry off!
Children that get very wet or muddy have extra clothes that they can change in, but we can not help ten kids all change at the same time so having appropriate outdoor gear will help the children out a lot! It might be helpful to send in some extra clothes too!
We will send home a note if their extra clothing bags are running low. So as a quick recap, in order to support your child’s outdoor play, please send rain boots, rain gear (jacket with hood, pants, etc.) and a towel. Hopefully, we will get some warmer weather to accompany this rain so the use of gloves won’t be so necessary but we will do our best to rinse gloves and mittens that are covered in mud. Thanks in advance!
Some interesting articles regarding the benefits of mud play:
Note: We will be making changes in the outdoor environment over Spring Break, such as adding more wood chips.
