My Mom is a pre-school teacher and recently asked me to do a healthy living segment with her kiddos. It will be over Skype and it will be all about eating healthy with some kiddo yoga at the end. I am super excited about this; mainly, because it will give me an opportunity to teach her potato chip-loving 4 year olds about plants and eating real food.
If you have ever watched Master Chef Kids or Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, you know that there is a serious separation between the kids that understand healthy eating and food groups and the kids that think a french fry is a vegetable. Thankfully, there are ways to close this gap among kiddos, and even better, a lot of them make healthy living fun!
Who's Your Momma?
I love this game. Who's Your Momma can be played with any food at anytime. The point of this game is to show a child a food and ask them where it came from. Answers can be simple such as, apples and trees or carrots and the ground. Nutritionists say this helps teach children the origin of their food and how to separate food groups.
This game can also teach them the difference between natural and synthesized. Anything with preservatives, red dyes, or yellow dyes is from a factory.
The Color Game
Funny, but some of us adults could even benefit from this game. During our day, adults and kiddos alike are meant to eat foods that are purple, yellow, red, white, and green. A great way to help young ones understand food is to match up colors for foods. Purple grapes are purple, cauliflower is white, apples are red, and so on. This game helps teach kids colors and healthy food groups.
Another great way to encourage eating all the color groups is to give silly bandz that are the color your child just ate. At the end of the day they [hopefully] have an arm full of silly bandz and you are both able to see the colors they have been eating.
Grocery Store Guessing
Have you ever gone into the grocery store and not known what something in the produce section is? I have. Chances are pretty high that your children are in the dark about a few of these things too. Next time you are at the store, ask them what they think something is. It can start out easy with apples, but then go super hard... Especially if you are shopping Whole Foods or Fresh Market. Help them out and they can start increasing their deductive skills as well!