Want to engage your children in the experience of new foods? Set their imaginations on fire?
1. Choose five fruits and five vegetables and organize them by their colors: red, green, yellow and blue.
2. Create your own edible fruit bouquet by piercing fruit slices on skewars and using half a cabbage as a base to stick the skewers in.
3. At the grocery store, see how many healthy foods start with each letter of the alphabet.
4. Make an animal out of an apple or pear with toothpicks, berries and walnuts.
5. String a necklace or bracelet with yarn and different shapes of noodles. (Paint them if you wish.)
6. Decorate an old hat with vegetables using glue sticks, and call it your "imagination hat." Then share a story with friends.
7. Plant some herb seeds in a cup of soil, water them, and watch the seedings grow.
8. Build a veggie-monster on a paper plate with toothpicks holding the pieces together.
9. Count how many oranges are in each bag at the grocery store. Then count the bags. How many oranges do you think there are all together?
10. Carve your own stamp into half a potato or jicama, dip it in paint, and press it down on paper for a special design.
I wish I could take credit for these ideas, but I can't.
They come from the terrific book Healthy Foods from A to Z, Comida sana de la A a la Z. Not only will this book teach your kids about fruits and vegetables, it will also teach them Spanish!!! Check it out.
Remember, games, cooking, gardening and other ways of exposing kids to foods are like earrings...they're accessories.
Accessories don't do much on their own, but they can make an outfit rock.
Games, gardening, cooking, and crafts all work best when you add them onto a solid feeding structure—Read House Building 101.
If you've got a kid who will cook but who won't eat, you know what I mean.
~Changing the conversation from nutrition to habits.~