Nutrition in a Nutshell

The kids have been cooped up in the house for the last couple of rainy days and were feeling restless.  After running around screaming happily and giggling turned into running around screaming at each other and crying, I asked the kids to pick something new to do.  Briana asked me, “Can we have an activity, please?”, by which she meant some sort of mommy driven learning opportunity.  I was planning to talk about nutrition to the kids this week, because Briana keeps asking me if things are healthy or not before we eat.  This is an unfortunate side effect of my joining Weight Watchers after Thanksgiving and losing over 40lbs (Go me!) and, as a result, I am currently spending a lot of time looking at nutrition labels and my Weight Watchers’ books.  I wanted to present the idea of balanced nutrition to my girls before they incorrectly intuit what “healthy exercise and eating habits” means and waste too much time throughout their lifetimes revising that image.  The thing is that today is Sunday, and we usually do our activity on Tuesday afternoon or some time on Wednesday so I didn’t have what I was going to do completely worked out.

I run downstairs and grabbed my laptop.  I know that I want to start with introducing the food pyramid, but I haven’t quite worked out how.  So I load the usda new food pyramid for preschoolers that I had previously found:

http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/Resources/mpk_poster.pdf

I walk the kids through the chart, showing them each food group: grains, vegetables, fruits, milk, meat & beans, and oils.  I have to keep correcting myself because when I learned the food pyramid it was an actual pyramid and the fruits and veggies were together and there were carbohydrates and proteins and fats.  I don’t like the newfangled wording.  Did I just age myself?

  

We talk about what kinds of foods go into each group.  Since the new food pyramid that I had didn’t have specific numbers of portions, we talked about the relative sizes.  “We can eat lots of grains, vegetables, and milks.  We can eat a medium amount of fruits  (hey, that’s not what Weight Watchers says!) and meats.  We eat only a little bit of oils and fats.”  We also talk about the pictures of kids exercising all around the pyramid, and how exercise is important to grow big and strong too.  Then we talk about what the kids had for breakfast (a rice cake with peanut butter, scrambled eggs, and orange juice) and where all of the foods go on the food pyramid.  “We ate healthy!”, Bree happily points out, “but we didn’t have any vegetables.   I can get us some carrots.  I have some.”  She runs into the playroom and returns with 3 plastic carrots, one for each of us.  That gives me an idea!  Thanks, Bree!  Now I know what activity we could do to make the food pyramid come alive. 

“Bree, go get all of the play food and bring it into the kitchen.”  Bree runs off to get it. 

“Abby, go get us one piece of each color of paper from the drawer.”  Abby runs to the drawer where I keep the construction paper.  I thought she’d need some help making sure she got one of each color, but she tells me, “No, Mommy.  That’s my work.  That’s my work!”  So I leave her to it.  She comes back with more than one piece of each color, but did manage to get each color.

Part1: Making the Food Pyramid and Sorting Foods

“We’re going to make the food pyramid.”  We take some time getting the right color and general size and shape for our pyramid and we tape the whole thing together. 

Then I tell the kids to each pick out one food from the basket of plastic foods and put it where it goes on the pyramid.  The first few are hard because the kids didn’t quite understand where everything was on the floor, so a few times they’d say things like, “I know the broccoli is a vegetable but I don’t know where to put it.” Or “Where does a hotdog go if it has a meat and a grain?”  The hotdog at least was such that we could take it apart and put each of the parts in the right section.  The donut proved difficult because you couldn’t take the chocolate off and therefore I wanted to put it in the fats and oils with the chocolate.  Bree chooses to keep moving it back and forth to show Abby that it was both.  Potatoes are vegetables, but where do potato chips go?  I couldn’t let the kids think that they were vegetables so I have to explain that they were fried in a lot of oil so we should put them in the oils.  Briana disagrees and said chips and french fries have to be a vegetable if they were potatoes.  I let her put them in the vegetables since the point of this part was understanding the sorting, not teaching about healthy snack choices, and I guess she was right.  After a while the kids can see what was in each food group and what their next food was most like.  Then the sorting went quickly. 

  

There are a few foods that I had no idea on.  What is garlic?  Ketchup?  We talk out our reasoning and select somewhere to put everything.

Part 2:  Shopping and Making Healthy Choices

When the food was all sorted, I hand out old Kroger bags to the kids and mix up all of the food.  I tell them to go shopping for the family for dinner.  Abby is very selective, choosing only “hot dog, hot dog, hot diggity dog” and dancing with her hot dogs and bag to her song from Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  Eventually Briana helps fill Abby’s bag too.

Sadly by this point the area that we’re in is littered with food and construction paper, and while I took pictures there’s just no way I can show you the mess we made and expect you to want to do this at your house.  Trust me, it cleans up quickly!  But yeah, no pics of my house trashed.

Then we sit down and look at whether we’d have a healthy meal with what everyone got.  Healthy in this case was defined as a meal having something from each of the food groups.  There are multiple revisions to the shopping. 

When the shopping was done and each girl had picked out a “healthy” meal, I ask them to find one thing they have and trade it for something that they thought would be better for their bodies.  I was set to define “better for your body”, but Briana understood that the chips she had weren’t the best choice.   She held up her chips and asked what else she could pick to go with her chicken, carrot, green apple, milk, and chocolate dinner.  I say, “What about pasta?”  “No pasta!”  (Which incidentally she also says later in the day when I proceed to make pasta for dinner.)  “How about a piece of bread?”  She reluctantly swaps her chips for a piece of bread with an “Ok.”   Abby doesn’t budge, but I’m not sure she totally understands the request.  I try to show her some things we could change on her picks, but apparently Abby’s happiness with this activity hinges on her being able to keep the hot dog and sing “hot dog diggity dog” over and over.  Ok.

Had I had a chance to better prepare for this activity I would have researched a good way to communicate what is healthy to a toddler, since preparation methods are confusing to them and calories are a bit much to introduce (though on the plus side, I can spend my free time fooling around on facebook on Monday and Tuesday now J ).  Hopefully I will continue to make better choices for myself and my family and the kids will pick up on it.  They already have a sense somehow of what is a “treat” (candy, cookies, gummies, etc.) and what is a “good snack” (string cheese, fruit, yogurt, crackers, hummus with veggies, etc.) so somehow they get it.

Part 3:  Snack Time

I let the kids pick their own snack after we’re finished and getting tired out.  They pick fresh apples and ask that I slice the apples to dip in the peanut butter that they made last week.  Usually I’d object to having peanut butter twice in one day, especially since breakfast was only a couple of hours ago, but I let it go because their first choice companion for the apples was string cheese, which we are out of.

Next week we’ll be in Disney World where hopefully we can sneak in a tiny bit of nutrition among the Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes and ice cream treats.  I’ll be back in 2 weeks.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife