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!

Play dough

January is upon us and it certainly has brought lots of cold temperatures along with it!  As we stay inside to keep warm, I’d like to offer some suggestions to keep the fun and learning indoors until the warmer weather arrives.

Play dough. The material is easy to make, fun to manipulate, and playing with it addresses all of the critical domains of growth and development.  If you want to get fancy, you can engage your child in looking around the house to find some things to bring into your dough play.  Cookie cutters are a go-to, but unusual kitchen items such as bottle caps, forks, and rolling pins can also encourage imagination and problem solving. Follow your child’s lead and experiment with how the utensils change the shape, texture, or look of the dough.

Before I get ahead of myself, I want to give you a recipe to make the play dough. Like baking, making play dough with your child is a learning experience in and of itself! For making play dough, you will need:

Ingredients:

·         1 cup                     water

·         1 pkt.                     Kool-Aid

·         6 cups                   flour

·         1 cup                     vegetable oil

Gather:

·         Measuring cups

·         Mixing bowl

·         Wooden spoon

Directions:

1.       In a bowl, mix water and food coloring.

2.       Add flour.

3.       Add oil.

4.       Stir together.

5.       Knead until smooth in texture. 

Encourage language by talking through the steps with your child. First we will pour; second we will stir, mix, and knead. Your sneaking in ordinal words in context. Providing children with hands-on experiences along with the words will help those words to stick. Use words that describe the mixture as it changes; pointing out how the ingredients transform as others are added: mushy, wet, smooth, and dry. Making play dough together not only gives real-life opportunities to provide language, but also adds science concepts as the children observe the processes that take place.

Math concepts are introduced next—at the good part; manipulating the dough. As you play together, point out big and small sizes and shapes that are created. Challenge your child to sort the items you’ve made into categories. Compare the lengths of the snakes that you roll. Thinking about these ideas will prepare them for more complex math concepts in the future.

While you are exercising the fine motor muscles of the fingers by pinching and poking the play dough, you are also teaching the social skills of sharing, cooperation, and perhaps turn taking. All of these foundational skills will benefit your child as they go to school: fine motor skills encourage the strength needed to write and draw, turn taking sets your child up for social success with peers.

Make believe or pretend play is also encouraged by play dough. Anything from a pizza party to a fire breathing dragon is possible with imagination and creativity. Talk with your child while manipulating the dough and you might be surprised by what you learn as they express themselves through the material.  Play is the work of young children, so why not learn and have fun?