Healthy Eating

This week we learned about good food choices.  There were so many game and activity inspirations for this one that I had a blast trying my favorites on my little learners.  We started, as usual, with a trip to the library and came home with many good finds.  Fabulous Fruits and Vital Vegetables were good preschool-age books on those topics from a series called Slim Goodbody's Nutrition Edition.  The kids and I also really enjoyed Sesame Street's Happy Healthy Monsters: Grover's Guide to Good Eating.

And I picked out one of the various books they had on the food pyramid.

Since information on food and health is updated so frequently, I made sure all the books were published within the last five years.

The next activity we did was a food sorting activity.

First I gave the kids a stack of old magazines and scissors and helped them to find and cut out any picture of food they could find.

Then, after cleaning our mess, we worked together on our big table to sort them in various ways.  We sorted our fruits and vegetables by color.

We learned from the Happy Healthy Monsters book what types of benefits the different colors of fruits and vegetables have for the body.  So I drew a body and Isaac drew the body parts that are benefitted by each color fruit and vegetable category.

Yellow/Orange: Eyes and Heart (and germ fighting!)

Blue/Purple (we didn't have very many of this color!): Brain and Heart

Red: Brain and Heart

White: Heart

Green: Eyes, Teeth, and Bones

We sorted by "Sometimes Foods" and "Anytime Foods" (as we learned again in the Monster book).

And we sorted by food groups into our own food pyramid.  The idea behind doing the pyramid this way is that the foods at the top of each food group are to be eaten less often than the foods at the bottom of each food group (such as canned vegetables at the top and fresh at the bottom).

The next day, we took a trip to the grocery store.  Unlike our normal grocery shopping experience (where I usually try to have as little interaction with the kids as possible!), this time I had the kids help me select a rainbow of fruits and vegetables.  We also discussed good and bad food choices as we went down the aisles.  (Abby wanted a yogurt so I talked her out of one choice that had 18 grams of sugar in exchange for one that had 3 grams.)

Later, the kids helped me prepare a colorful salad and fruit smoothies with our fresh produce.  We used our whole wheat bread to make some crostini-pizzas too! (Recipe blog post to come!)

Sampling the goods.

Earlier in the year, the kids discovered some great games on pbskids.org that are about eating healthy.  This one from Sid the Science Kid called "Mix it Up" helps the kids practice sorting foods by food group.  There's another Sid game called "Kitchen Magician" where kids learn what basic food item goes into certain simple dishes (like applesauce or a grilled cheese sandwich).  I helped reinforce what we were learning by asking them what food group it came from too.  And in this one from Sesame Street called "Color Me Hungry," Grover and Cookie Monster help kids practice sorting food by color so they can "eat their colors."

Playing "Mix it Up."