I love teaching and talking about nutrition, fruits and veggies! I enjoy teaching the kids all about the 5 food groups, the food plate, eating the rainbow and more. They learn all about what foods are good for you and which foods are not and we do some fun exercises to energetic kid friendly music! I have a few books I always read during this week including Lunch and The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza. We also do a cute craft to go with each of them.
As I said earlier, we always read the book Lunch by Denise Fleming. The book is all about a mouse who eats all these healthy fruits and vegetables and gets a full tummy. Along the way, he also gets the food all over him. The kids get to make a cute mouse craft and they use q-tips to add all the different colors of fruits and veggies on the mouse's body!
Another book we read was The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza) retold by Philemon Sturges. I love this book and we talk all about pizza and the veggies you can put on your pizza. The children make a pizza glyph to go along with the book. FYI... I love glyphs!
We also always talk about how you should eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables. What craft could be more fun than to make a rainbow with colorful fruits and veggies all over it!? For this craft, I had clip art of fruits and veggies that I printed out for each color. We gave the children thin, small pieces of construction paper to make their rainbow and we did one color at a time. When they were all through making a rainbow, they added their fruits and vegetables to it. I typed up and printed the words for fruit, veggies and Eating a Rainbow and the children glued them on their craft.
Of course, all the children in my class are precious in my eyes so they all deserved to be kings and queens for a day! So, we made fruit and veggie crowns. I am a member of the site www.kidssoup.com and I use the templates from this site for this craft.
One more craft we do is is making our own plate modeled after the one for Choose My Plate. The children use a paper plate and glue down cut out sections to make the plate. They then glue on the coordinating foods for each of the food groups. You can get some printable materials to use with your class at www.choosemyplate.gov/food-groups and another great site to get printables and teaching material from is www.nourishinteractive.com/nutrition-education
And lastly for crafts, this is just a quick and easy one to take up some extra time in class. The kids get to make a vegetable garden. I typed up and used clip art to make garden stakes with veggie names and the children can either glue wads of tissue paper or this year, we just cut foam squares with sticky on the back and let them place them down.
And last, I would like to share a great coloring/following directions worksheet I found while searching the internet. You can find it here: www.camdenchildrensgarden.org/
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