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    Mud Kitchen in a Day: How to quickly get your kids outside, playing in the dirt, & enjoying creative play.
    Mud Kitchen in a Day: How to quickly get your kids outside, playing in the dirt, & enjoying creative play.
    Mud Kitchen in a Day: How to quickly get your kids outside, playing in the dirt, & enjoying creative play.
    Ebook72 pages39 minutes

    Mud Kitchen in a Day: How to quickly get your kids outside, playing in the dirt, & enjoying creative play.

    By Jason Sperling

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Looking for that perfect summer distraction to get the kids out into the backyard? Learn how to set up a simple and inexpensive children’s mud kitchen in a day, allowing your children or grandchildren endless hours of plain and dirty backyard fun. Follow one father’s entertaining and informative attempt to get his children outside, offline, and into the mud. Author Jason Runkel Sperling takes us inside his experience creating a backyard mud kitchen for his two small children. Full of humor, parenting insight, and in-depth research, Sperling’s account will inspire you to create your own mud kitchen in a day, maximizing family fun, bonding, and creativity.

    This easy-to-follow guide is appropriate for parents of any skill level and backyards of any size. Forgoing complex design, Sperling’s mud kitchen guide focuses on the essential components of a mud kitchen using simple resources, allowing just about anyone to create a stellar children’s mud kitchen in only one day.

    Dozens of additional resources are included, such as:

    •Where to get supplies, whether by making, finding, or buying them
    •Outdoor play and its value to child development
    •The value of dirt in building strong immune systems
    •Comprehensive list of inspiring case studies, articles, and photographs of mud kitchens from around the world

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJason Sperling
    Release dateOct 14, 2015
    ISBN9781311354402
    Mud Kitchen in a Day: How to quickly get your kids outside, playing in the dirt, & enjoying creative play.
    Author

    Jason Sperling

    Jason Sperling serves as Global Executive Creative Director for Facebook Reality Labs. For over two decades, he has been developing iconic, award-winning advertising for clients that include Apple, Honda, Pixar, TikTok, Amazon, and UNICEF. His Apple “Get a Mac” campaign was declared Campaign of the Decade by Adweek and was one of Ad Age’s Top Campaigns of the century. In 2015 he was selected as one of the Top 30 Creative Directors in the country. His first book on breakthrough marketing, Look at Me When I’m Talking to You: Building Brand Attraction in an Age of Brand Aversion, was released on Instagram (@lookatmebook) and was launched a page a day for over 160 days.

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      Book preview

      Mud Kitchen in a Day - Jason Sperling

      Introduction

      I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where the Rocky Mountains give way to the Great Plains and the sun shines most days. The memories of my childhood are filled with outdoor adventures: rafting, hiking, camping, skiing, surfing, and scuba diving. After spending a couple decades traveling and living around the world, I returned to Boulder with my wife, Michele, to raise our adventurous five-year-old daughter Nyla and our sweet, tentative one-year-old son Silas.

      Back on my home turf in Colorado, I was eager to expose my children to the natural wonders that I remembered exploring as a kid. I began taking my children to the woods, lakes, and mountains of the beautiful state. But something wasn’t right. I grew increasingly aware that their needs did not align with my adventurous goals. For example, they didn’t particularly care if we made it to the summit of a mountain. They preferred to play in the muddy stream banks along the trail. They didn’t care if we paddled to a cascading, gurgling tributary. They wanted to make boats from nearby leaves and twigs and sail them off to an imaginary world. They didn’t care about mastering the alpine slopes on a pair of skis. They were content to jump off a snow bank in the parking lot.

      One early morning, Nyla and I crossed a mountain stream as we hiked up a canyon. When we reached the far side, she stopped and crouched down to pick at the stream bank. I enjoyed watching her pluck at the water’s edge, fiddle with sticks, and push pebbles around. Her hands were dirty, and her sneakers gooey with mud and chilly water. After a minute or so, I urged her to get moving. She responded that she didn’t want to hike. She wanted to play. With all the work of getting up early, packing backpacks full of supplies, researching and planning, and then driving to the trailhead, it was really disappointing to hear her say she didn’t want to hike. She wanted to play. She did not share my dreams. But as I let the waves of dismay pass, I saw how she blossomed with joy and creativity, and remained thoroughly engaged for the next hour.

      At that point, I realized I needed to temper my ambitions of introducing my children to goal-oriented and skill-based outdoor adventures. I decided to observe what activities seemed to be the most rewarding for them and then support those activities. Some things are obvious: Sitting in a car seat is no fun for a kid. Mastering an athletic skill or following rules can be rather dull for small children.

      It began to dawn on me…why not let the children enjoy unstructured play? Why not just stay home in the backyard?

      Today, unstructured play, outdoor experiences, and spaces have been transformed significantly from previous decades. The seemingly unlimited free time children once knew as childhood has become dominated by school, extracurricular activities, less spacious lands for wandering freely, and a growing sense of fear in letting children follow their own agenda. Overall, there is simply far less time and freedom for children today to just play. Much free time is oriented to screen-based activities versus free-play outside. Add to this reality the fact that many backyards are manicured and designed for adult enjoyment rather than children’s use.

      My parents and friends

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