Make a gorgeous invitation to play with this mud play dough recipe, pretend flowers, mini pots and gardening tools! Perfect for a Spring play and learning activity or a garden themed sensory play idea for home and school.

How to make mud play dough:

To make this fun mud play dough recipe simply use my ever-trusty 4 minute, no-cook play dough recipe (click the words to be taken directly to the link on this site) with the following addition.

While adding the boiling water, dissolve 3-4 teaspoons of instant coffee into it first to create a dark brown colouring. Then continue to make it as usual, stirring all the ingredients together and kneading until it becomes a soft and pliable dough!

Set it out as a lovely little invitation to play along with some garden themed accessories and invite them to play!

We used:

small compostable pots (these are fabulous for so many learning activities)

fabric flowers

miniature carrots

small metallic buckets

wooden play dough tools

mini watering can

white tray (again, useful for so many play set ups)

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They were all engaged in this and had a lot of fun creating a flower shop and selling their creations to customers.

Miss 8 was really focused on arranging flowers for sale and Miss 5 loved planting all of the carrots inside the pots. This was a great fine motor activity as it took some work to push into the mud play dough, especially as she then decided to cover them over completely too.

Miss 7 went in a slightly different direction, creating succulents and taping the price labels for them to her clothes for easy advertising. Ha! 🙂

Mr 2 drove his tractors and diggers over the mud play dough and we then made a whole separate invitation to play for him using his favourite vehicles as he was loving it so much. I will share photos of that play set up soon too.