Eating Fruits and Veggies

This month's theme is Food and Fitness so we learned about the importance of eating  healthy foods from the different food groups, especially fruits and vegetables.

The shape for this month was a heart so I used my handy-dandy Photoshop shape tool to create a quick paper for them to practice tracing.  I'm sure you could find something prettier online for free, this was just the fastest thing for me and I wanted Miss M to get some practice before we work on her Valentine's cards for her playgroup party on Friday.  Littlest had fun with it and even allowed me to help her trace (this is a big deal because she usually throws a fit when you suggest she can't do something by herself).

The vegetable math counters have been a HUGE hit at our house.  As soon as I took them out of the bag, I almost lost the kids entirely because all they wanted to do was play with them.  They divvied them up by kind pretty quickly and we practiced tracing around them and counting them.  They were also a good way to review/teach colors.

The vegetable washing game was a hit as well.  Rather than using water and real vegetables (which would end up all over the floor because Littlest loves splashing and dumping water), I gathered vegetables from our play kitchen and a clean sponge and let the girls take turns counting to 12 as they scrubbed the veggies.  That was pretty easy for them so I wrote out a number line on a piece of scratch paper, circled every other number and had them count by 2s.

Last month we slacked on our journal so I'm excited to get back into for February.  We decorated our covers with pictures of produce from the grocery ads and they named their favorites to eat.  Miss M kept saying how much she loved carrots, although she's never eaten them when I've cooked them so I gave her some matchstick carrots at snack and she gobbled them right up.

I made up a little vegetable soup game with vegetable counters since they all wanted a chance to put them in a bowl and stir them.  I made little cards out of construction paper and wrote each type of vegetable on a card, along with a number that indicated how many were to be added to the bowl.  I made sure not to have more than four of each type of vegetable called for so we wouldn't have to take vegetables out for someone to complete a turn.  So, for example, I had a card that said 1 pepper and another that said 3 peppers since we had four peppers total.  It gave them a chance to practice reading numbers and seeing if they could figure out which vegetable was written on there based on the initial letter.

Instead of having the girls go diving under a blanket to pick the pretend strawberries on Fruit Day (which I knew would lead to them playing other things and not paying attention to what we were trying to do), we used a blanket to make a row where we "planted" them.  It was a good chance to help Littlest with color identification while the others used the die to see how many red ones they would get to put in their baskets.

The girls loved making their own strawberries and pouncing the seeds on with the poky ball.  I drew leaves for them to cut out to give them some more guidance and practice with turning the paper.  Miss M got a little confused and ended up cutting her paper into little green pieces while I helped her sister but we figured out how to make it look good and she was very proud of herself.

We also traced the letter J with orange juice, as written in the Teachers Guide.  The girls loved the smell of the orange and asked for them at snack time.  Littlest was especially smitten with hers and kept running off with it.

I printed off the food groups coloring book from the Member Resources section of the website and they colored the fruit picture. I like to have coloring options for the girls when we go out to eat so this will end up in our "restaurant" bag to help keep them calm and quiet.

Those were a few of our activities from this week!  I hope something was helpful.