Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

If you have been following this blog for a length of time, you know that we LOVE outdoor play, and one of our favorite outdoor activities is to cook in our mud pie kitchen! However, our wonderful mud pie kitchen as shown above, looks nothing like that photo today.....   Mud pies aren't really an option when the ground is frozen and most of the kitchen is covered in snow! That doesn't stop us from playing in our outdoor kitchen, you see.... Now we don't have a "mud" pie kitchen, but instead, we have a "snow cake" kitchen! Many of our tools for our kitchen are burried in the snow, but these lovely molds are PERFECT for snow cakes! The sun and warmer weather (almost 40 degrees Fahrenheit today!) have made our snow quite pliable and thus we have the perfect ingredients for snow cakes! The perfect snow cakes are packed with lots of snow!   The change in season and natural materials lend themselves nicely to expanding upon childre...

 (Our mud pie kitchen, in the very beginning) Ever since Jenny over at Let the Children Play posted about Mud Pie Kitchen s (almost a year ago), we have had the "madness" The mud-pie kitchen madness that is :). I immediately found a few things and spiffed up a section of the yard into our very own mud pie kitchen .  Like all things in an indoor or outdoor classroom, the play and space has continued to evolve.  Over the last week, we have done a little "renovation" in the kitchen.  Look what I found for FREE at a yard sale!!!! You can't beat a free shelving unit for your kitchen renovation! The more free and inexpensive things you can find the better ;). With the new sand filling in our sandbox, it was the perfect time to do a little bit of rearranging, and stocking. The hanging baskets received a fresh helping of long grass, and the bins have been collecting every rock we find mixed in with the sand. We put a few more hooks ...

We have made a lot of changes to our outdoor play area, but when winter comes.... it is hard to tell in the snow! This is what "lake effect" snow looks like: Our music area. (I had considered moving it in for the winter, but thought we would try it out in the snow.... The drum and stumps are now covered.) There won't be any mud pies for a couple of months, although some snow pies may be in the works...... All of this snow came within the last 24 hours. We've been out shoveling. We love living on a hill..... When the snow from the parking pad is shoveled, We have a great "butt" slide. We call it a "butt" slide because we have to go down on our bottoms. We save the sleds for the park where we don't have to worry about the fence :). Although, sometimes it is just as fun to go down on our bellies! It was a great day to test out the new snow, I'm sure all of our daycare friends will be itching to get out there tomorrow too! I'm sure we...

After this weekend's UPAEYC conference with Dan Hodgins , my backyard is starting to become "famous," well, at least locally. What an honor and a surprise! In response to some of the questions and comments, I am going to provide a few more photos to help those of you who are looking to make some changes to your outdoor classrooms. Our Mudpie Kitchen Like the other sections of our yard, I did not come up with this idea on my own. I was really inspired for this area by my blogger friend Jenny over at Let the Children Play . She found an array of great mudpie kitchens . Immediately after her post, I started to scrounge around the house looking for things to add to our mudpie kitchen. We had a kitchen in our backyard (you know, one of those plastic ones), but I wanted a more natural and "real" kitchen. Our mudpie kitchen is evolving. The stove burners are made with moveable wooden cookies. We have 2 shelves right now, I do see this changing over time...

I've been inspired yet again through the online community of early childhood educators and bloggers. The collection of Mud Pie Kitchens provided by Jenny at Let the Children Play was AMAZING, and my brain immediately went to work.... what could our Mud Pie Kitchen look like? I knew I could get a jump start on it over the weekend, and I specifically went to look for Mud Pie Kitchen items at the yardsales and second hand stores. I also knew that I had some things that we could use already. This is the kitchen we have used outdoors in the past. It has not been visited all that frequently: Here is the start of our new outdoor- "MUD PIE KITCHEN": Not much, but enough for a start. I found some wooden bowls and heavy duty wooden spoons and utensils at the yard sales. I had some pine cones and some wooden cookies lying around that I added to the mix. For now, a plastic utility shelf serves as our stove with wooden cookies for the hot plates. A couple of flower boxes are holding ...