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Teaching Children Nutrition with Play Food
If you are looking to use play food to encourage your children’s healthy eating habits, I would highly recommend Melissa and Doug play food. You can purchase this play food at Blooming-Babies.com.
Melissa and Doug play food is perfect for teaching healthy nutrition.
Yes, they did just come out with the ice cream set which is a lot of fun! They do also offer healthier play food choices such as:
Cutting Food Box: filled with fruits, vegetables and a loaf of bread
Sushi: including 3 types of sushi including shrimp, tuna and salmon
Food Group Set: including 21 items and four crates to hold the food
Sandwich Making Set: including tomato, lettuce, cheese, and bread to help teach your children how to build a healthy.
Kitchen Bottle Set: including condiment bottles perfect for teaching young children about matching and sizes. Plus they are fun to use in pretend play!
Birthday Cake: perfect for celebrating friends birthdays
Pizza: including choices of pepperoni, mushroom or peppers
Here are a few fun activities for teaching children nutrition:
1. Record your food choices on a calendar or in a diary. This will help give you and your children a chance to see what kind of food they are eating. This is a great exercise to teach children to read and write.
2. Get your children involved in meal planning! Pick items from each of the food groups.
3. Make a poster of healthy foods, activities or both. This can be done even with preschool children. My girls love cutting and gluing.
Older children may make a fancier poster with more information. For younger children, write the words of each of the food groups to include reading with this art activity.
4. Exercise with your children. You may choose to walk to preschool, do a children’s yoga video or go for a bike ride! You and your children will have lots of fun exercising together.
5. Make a game out of sorting food into groups. You can do this in the kitchen with real food for hands on learning. Or you can use pictures cut out of magazines to make your own food game.
You could also make a matching food game!
6. Make a food book. This could be as simple as drawing pictures of food and writing a sentence about it. Or have the children classify their favorite foods into the different food groups.
7. To help get your children involved, take them to the grocery store to help pick healthy foods. Buy fruits and veggies in season.
You may want to try a new grocery store so you can try to purchase a few new fruits and veggies. For example, we went to our local market and purchased Yakama. This is a white potato vegetable that is fresh and crunchy. – My girls loved it!
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