Mud Faces

A Forest School classic, making mud faces requires absolutely nothing but nature, and imagination. This makes it a winning ‘up your sleeve’ idea for brightening up a dreary autumn day, wherever you find yourself.

First up is some satisfying, sensory mud-making. If it’s dry, then you’ll need to add water to your soil in order to mix up a gooey consistency - not too runny, but certainly wet enough to scoop up and stick on your chosen surface. My three love to create their mud-art on a tree trunk, but they could just as easily use the floor (outdoors, obvs.).

We then simply look around us and forage for facial features - acorns, sticks, leaves, stones, petals - anything that inspires. We add these to our mud faces and watch them come alive! Why not set a challenge for the children to create certain facial expressions - can they make a halloween scary face, or a laughing one or even a self-portrait?

If you’ve made yours during a dry spell, or well-sheltered from the rain, you can return to your faces in a day or so, and see how they’ve changed as the mud has dried. We experimented with using bird-food in the hope that our faces would encourage our local feathered friends to feast on our faces. Which sounds painful, but I like alliteration

However you spend your precious Sunday, try not to be put off by the autumn drizzle and greyness. There’s fun to be had outdoors.