Food. It's colorful, it smells good, and it tastes great!  Food not only nourishes your body, but it provides lots of learning opportunities as well. This month, we have partnered with the National Kidney Foundation to present Regie Rainbow. The program's goals are to introduce young children and families to the importance of choosing a healthy lifestyle.  By relating the colors of fruits and vegetables to those on the rainbow, the books shared during the program helps to incorporate healthy habits in a fun and creative manner.

Regie Rainbow is a superhero broccoli character who introduces the colors and concepts. Regie gains his super powers by eating from all the colors of the rainbow, limiting screen time, and exercising every day. As the teachers move through the program, they read each of Regie's island adventures aloud. Next, the children move on to explore and prepare a fruit or vegetable that coordinates with the adventure. The children come together at the table and work as a team to use their senses to explore the whole fruit or vegetable before cutting it into bite sized portions. The sense of taste is the last sense that the children use to find out more. In some classrooms, they've even taken the next step and used their prepared vegetables to cook/bake the afternoon snack!

While visiting the Island of Orange, we introduced peppers and carrots. We heard words such as crunchy and sweet as the children used their sense of taste. The children worked together to turn the carrots into french fries to bake and added cinnamon and applesauce to create carrot cookies with the grated vegetable. Believe me, the smells were wonderful that afternoon!

During our visit to the Island of Red, our creative and skilled teachers worked with the children to prepare tomato candy. The cut up pieces of red tomato were placed inside a dehydrator. Once done, the children snacked on nature's candy. This experience surprised some of the children who used the word sweet to describe what they had created.

Research has shown that children are more apt to sample unknown fruits and vegetable when they have had an opportunity to participate in the preparation. Sitting next to a peer that is an adventurous eater often motivates them too. Regie Rainbow provides us with an opportunity to introduce fruits and vegetables to children in the context of play.

The islands that we visit represent all the colors of the rainbow; so we have a lot of traveling to do! I invite you to join us on our island adventures by volunteering in your child's classroom. We'd love to see you and have you try some healthy snacks with us. Ask you classroom teacher which island is next on our destination and get ready to taste!