This Week In Tot School...

Nutrition!

Okay. I'm a dietitian and I talk to people every day about normal, healthy eating. How is it that I haven't come up with a simple lesson on nutrition until now? :)

This week, I introduced Will to the basic five food groups. We talked about eating from the rainbow, played a couple of fun games and read several, good, food-related books. We also addressed the importance of being active and talked about ways that Will likes to be active.

Last weekend, we kicked off our lesson with a visit to the farmer's market in downtown Toledo.

We saw lots of beautiful flowers, listened to a small band playing, ran into a friend and selected from an abundance of local, colorful produce.
It gets pretty busy and crowded at each farmer's booth, so I didn't get any pictures of all the fruits and vegetables. But here's a glimpse at our basket on the way out. We needed some fresh basil for lemon spaghetti last week, some zucchini for the zucchini coins side dish, and some strawberries because they are SO much better when they're grown locally.

Our main lesson this week was to learn the food groups. I got a large piece of poster board, and we sectioned off five spaces for dairy, vegetables, grains, fruit and meat/beans. We talked about each and then sorted a stack of food clippings I'd cut out and saved from about 5 weeks of grocery store ads.

Since taking this picture, we've added even more items. (I didn't even have a gallon of milk for the dairy group yet!) And I also decided to add a colorful printout of the food pyramid in the center.

My mom passed along an appropriate Weekly Reader with pictures of kids being active. It's a bigger than normal issue and it folds out to show swimming, dancing, jumping, etc. Then, Will and I colored a printout of the food pyramid together.

If you visit the MyPyramid website, you can get LOTS of basic nutrition information for you and your family. They have "personalized meal plans and interactive tools to help you plan/assess your food choices". There's also a section on My Pyramid for kids and preschoolers with teaching tools, printables, etc. You can put in your child's (or your own) age, ht/wt and activity level and get a personalized printout of his/her/your recommended intake from each of the food groups...

...as well as a sample meal and snack plan. I didn't address serving sizes or number of servings from each group with Will, but I do plan to make up a fun chart for him to count "5-a-day" from the fruits and vegetables groups to hang on our fridge. Then we can make a point to keep track of it here and there and even try to get a variety of colors each day.

On another evening after work, I taught Will how to play hopscotch.

I'm not sure he totally gets it, but he liked hopping around on the numbers.

This was a super cool game called Matching Fruit: half to whole. What a great lesson - and one that you probably wouldn't think of! Will didn't know what the outside of a whole kiwi looked like and he stumbled a bit on the plum/mango/peach cards because they are kind of similar with their pits. But he got starfruit right! And the others were pretty easy. I love how simple and fun file folder games can be at the appropriate time. I got the printables from here. You just glue down the halved fruit cards and let the child match the whole fruit cards to their respective counterparts.

Will challenged daddy to do it faster than he did.

Also that evening, I brought home my food models that I (rarely) use at work to show serving sizes of various foods. Will thought they were pretty cool and sorted them on top of the grocery ad cutouts into their appropriate food groups.

One of Will's favorite activities is riding his tricycle. He does it EVERY DAY and he's gotten quite good at it.

On this evening, he even raced daddy (on foot) up and down the driveway a few times. See this (plus a little extra Sophie footage) here and here.

When I saw this idea, I thought it was so cute (& frugal and easy!), but I didn't realize it would be Will's best effort to date at 1:1 correspondence. I picked up a few pieces of felt from Hobby Lobby (4 sheets for $1) and cut the green and red into half circles to look like a watermelon, and then picked up a bag of dry black beans to use as our counters (watermelon seeds). Here is how I set up the tray.

Then I asked Will to use the two half circles and make them look like a watermelon slice.

To play, he drew a folded up piece of paper from one of the bowls and opened it up to reveal a number from 1-8.

Then, he placed that number at the top of the tray and counted out that number of "watermelon seeds".

When he was done, he'd go back over and double check his work. I'm not sure why, but this just seemed to click with Will and he did so awesome on every number! He happily breezed through them all and then I even added numbers 9-12 to see if he could keep going.

In the middle of our game, daddy came home from visiting Aunt Cathy and Uncle Ronny and had a surprise for Will. Of course, he turned it into another taste guessing game...

We got a huge cup full of black raspberries from their garden! Thanks Cathy & Ronny!

Moving on, he did stumble a bit in counting higher than 8 and I also forgot that he isn't fully able to "read" and recognize numerals beyond 10. But I was proud of his efforts and we worked through it together. I always like to expose him to things just a bit higher than his comprehension level just to put it out there for him. It's good to help gauge where he's at with understanding different concepts and it gives him the interest that there's a whole world of information out there for him to absorb.

Will LOVES so many fruits and vegetables that "5-a-day" is a piece of cake for him. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's way over (especially with fruit) on any given day. So we talked about eating from the rainbow and how each color offers different health benefits to our bodies. Then we made a colorful list of fruits and vegetables we could think of.

I'm all for getting kids in the kitchen and teaching them to make and appreciate good food. Having a hand in the meal gives them pride, teaches a valuable (and often lost) life lesson, and opens their "acceptance" of new foods. But in reality, the huge increase in time it takes to involve children is often hard to accomodate. So much of my meal prep is done as fast as I can after the kids go to bed. It's not probably ideal, and I would certainly love to take time to teach them how to cook, but I have to really try hard to plan things that Will can help me with. This weekend, Will tried his hand at kneading homemade, honey wheat bread dough. The real deal. The good stuff. With yeast and two rise periods. Mmm!! He wasn't so sure about the texture of the sticky dough.

Pushing and turning, pushing and turning. This takes quite a lot of elbow grease to keep up for 10 minutes straight, so I took over when he got tired. :)

I wish I'd taken a picture after the first rise. That's my favorite part. When you remove the towel to find this huge pillow of dough, doubled in size. Then you punch it down, divide in two, roll out into two rectangles and roll up to place in the loaf pans. And oh my goodness. The house just smells heavenly when bread is baking!

The finished product!

Finally, here are a handful of books we borrowed from the library to go along with our nutrition lesson. Not all of them are actually nutrition related. But they were all books I'd seen recommended somewhere (magazines, other blogs, etc.) and they were all pretty cute.

Will loved LMNOPeas by Keith Baker. I thought it was just okay. From A-Z they show peas (as in the vegetable) working at various jobs that start with that letter.

Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert was helpful when we were making our rainbow foods list.

The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, and The Big Hungry Bear was very cute. Little Mouse wants to pick the big strawberry and have it all to himself but has to figure out how to avoid drawing the attention of the (illusioned) bear. I love the page where he tries to put the strawberry "in disguise".

Happy Healthy Monsters was one of the more educational ones, though not our favorite. I did love that they addressed the difference between "Everyday Foods" (fruits, vegetables, milk, water, etc.) and "Sometimes Foods" (treats, cake, candy, etc.) I think it's important that kids don't see treats and junk food as either forbidden or a "reward". So I like how this portrayed all foods as having a place in our diet, just some more often than others.

Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg was more of a rhyming, I Spy book than anything else. But Will enjoyed it and so did I.

Good For Me And You by Mercer Mayer was hands down the favorite. Will (who usually remembers and requests the actual title of each book) kept calling this "the exercise and healthy eating book". We read it daily and it was a good educational read.

This is ours and one that I know I've shared before. Food shaped into the alphabet.

And another of ours about a little girl on a journey to share some favorite (tropical) fruits with her friend.

Switching gears a bit to some nutrition information for parents. I checked out Lunch Lessons for myself to read (or skim, actually - I'm not finding much time for leisurely reading these days) and I think it's a good look at basic child nutrition and how to change the way we feed our children. Think outside the box! There are lots of kid-friendly recipes to get you started.

And finally, if there was ever a person I looked up to the most in my field, it is hands down: Ellyn Satter. She is phenomonal. A registered dietitian and family therapist, Ellyn is so profoundly simple and matter of fact about the importance of feeding our families and how VERY MUCH comes out of meal time beyond the obvious: nutrition. I own and have read two of her other books: 1) Child of Mine: Feeding with Love and Good Sense (this is a great one for ALL parents to read, even before kids are in the picture) and 2) How to Get Your Kid to Eat... But Not Too Much. I love them both and was ecstatic when she came out with this one in 2008.

I read and reread different parts from time to time and always appreciate the renewed sense of value I have for family meal time. I LOVE FOOD! And I take such pleasure in cooking and eating good food. Sure, it's a hassle sometimes I'd rather not be in the kitchen some Friday nights. But it is so important to me. Not only to instill normal, healthy food values in my children, but also to enjoy feeding myself. I think that's a lot of what drives me some weeks. When Craig's being obnoxiously picky or Will's refusing every main dish I put in front of him or Sophie is noisily squawking and dumping her milk all over her tray and I'd rather just say "Fine! Fend for yourselves!" I stick with it because many of those things will change and I want my children to see what meal time is supposed to be. If you don't display an importance and a value in feeding YOURSELF, you are not setting a good example of how to eat. Yes, it may be easier to feed the kid(s) first and make their plates look all pretty and then order pizza for yourselves to eat in peace after the kids are in bed. But what have they learned from that? Either mom and dad don't eat, or they don't consider it a valuable enough experience for to enjoy together as a family. So despite the arguments from Craig that we don't eat enough hot dogs, or the turned up noses from the kids here and there, and the hectic time that is 5:30-6:30 getting dinner on the table after work... I refuse to give up. I enjoy food to much and it's too important to me.

Here are a few excerpts from Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family just in the opening chapter entitled "The Secret in a Nutshell":

1) The secret to feeding a healthy family is to love good food, trust yourself, and share that love and trust with your child. ... Enjoyment of food and reward from eating are essential to having eating and feeding turn out well. When the joy goes out of eating, nutrition suffers.

2) Eating is about our regard for ourselves, our connection to our bodies, and our commitment to life itself. Feeding is about the love and connection between you and your child, about trusting or controlling, providing or neglecting, accepting or rejecting.

3) The bottom line is family meals. ... Family meals have more to do with positive outcomes for children and adolescents than any other factor - extracurricular activities, church, tutoring, music lessons - you name it.

4) It isn't easy, nowadays, to be a good eater or to raise a good eater. ... Family meals are eroding, with too many demands on everyone's time and too little value being placed on ensuring that families get this reliable time together.

5) Now, we have trouble with our eating and trouble with feeding our children. As a society, we are abominable about feeding ourselves and only marginally better about feeding our children. We no longer make feeding ourselves a priority. ... Lacking the routine of family meals, we orchestrate food for the primary purpose of feeding our children and end up catering to them so much that we bore ourselves with our repetitive menus and raise children who only eat what precisely suits them. [Ahh! This is so true!] In fact, since many of us were raised that way, we ourselves have short lists of foods we enjoy and have difficulty raising children to be capable with eating.

Okay, that's more than a few. If I could type up the whole book, I would. Or you could just go borrow/buy it for yourself. You won't regret it. While you're at it, pick up Child of Mine too. Both are awesome. They are the basis of normal, healthy eating.

Whew! What a tangent from Tot School! :) LOL But it was a fun week and a nice refresher for me as well.