Mud & Bloom – January 2020: Chilled out nature activities that rock

The aim of the Mud & Bloom boxes are to connect children to nature. Each box has been created for 3-8 year old children, and they have been designed by qualified teachers and support the national curriculum with influence from Forest School, Steiner and Montessori education.

Our Mud & Bloom box arrived just at the very end of 2019 so we set it aside to get busy once all of the business of the New Year had passed. We took a peek at what activities were inside and were really excited to try making our own ice lantern and painting some rocks. This was a generous box with plenty to get stuck in to.

What’s in the box?

• Paint your own pebbles guide
• Set of six paints
• Paintbrush
• Make your own ice lantern guide
• Tea light
• Grow your own Snapdragons
• Grow your own cauliflowers
• Nature news
• Garden birds quiz

The highlights

Our town has quite an active rock painting group but it was nice to do something a bit different as we hadn’t used these paints before. Luckily we had quite a few rocks on standby ready so this was the first activity we tried.

Despite trying to corale my 6 year old into painting ‘nature’ themed rocks we eventually decided to go for Pokemon! Once we’d painted toe rocks we let them dry and then added in the final details with a black sharpie. We haven’t varnished them yet but will do and then plan to hide them locally for other children to find.

Ice ice baby

The next activity was making an ice lantern. We had a great time going on an adventure to find lots of leaves and berries, thankfully we chose a bright sunny (and cold!) day to do this as we had to put this off for a bit due to all the rain. We ended up collecting enough to do two lanterns, a big one and a small one. The instructions were easy to follow and our smaller lantern was able to freeze in our freezer.

Sadly we just couldn’t get all of our bigger one to freeze, despite a few nights of sub zero temperatures (and it was too big for our freezer!). But now we know how to do this we’re going to do a few more throughout the year as the lanterns look lovely and we’ve loved seeing other creations that people have posted on Instagram too.

We’ve not been able to do a lot of sewing and planting recently but I’d made a point of saving lots of egg cartons over Christmas so we’ve been able to sew the seeds from this box ad the ones before that we’d held back. We can’t wait to see how these turn out.

Flowers and cauliflowers!

We really loved the fact that this box (and the one before) had seeds to grow food as well as flowers.

This was a great opportunity to learn about where a lot of our vegetables come from and we enjoyed planting our cauliflower seeds too. Cauliflower cheese is a favourite in our house so we can’t wait to see how these grow!

We loved the latest box and think the team at Mud & Bloom have done a brilliant job in creating a monthly subscription box that really gets you back to nature.