Healthy Foods

Learning to make healthy food choices is lifelong skill that benefits us all. This 15 Minute Circle Time helps set the stage to empower children to make healthy food choices.

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Attention Getter: Spilled Shopping Cart

Tell the class that you forgot to get your groceries for your family. The children know that groceries are important and so they will attentively see what you need to do. Ask them if it is o.k. if you hurry and go get the groceries. Then tell them to count to 20 and you will be back. As the children count, hurry around the corner and get the classroom shopping cart that is already filled with real groceries and hurriedly drive it back. When you get back to the group, "accidentally" spill the cart so that the groceries tumble to the middle of the floor. The children will be very surprised.

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Activity 1: Healthy and Not Healthy Food Sort

When the cart spills, exclaim that you have a problem! The food is all mixed up and now you don't know which food is HEALTHY for your family and which foods are NOT HEALTHY. Explain that healthy foods are foods that can be eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner and not healthy foods are those that have lots of sugars or salts and are only eaten as a treat.

Place a sign that says HEALTHY and one that says NOT HEALTHY on the floor and let the children take turns helping you sort the foods.

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Book: The Hungry Thing

The Hungry Thing is a great book about a Hungry Thing that comes to a village, has a sign that says, FEED ME, and speaks in rhymes. Read the key parts of the story and skip the extra details. You want the children to listen to the rhymes to know what the Hungry Thing wants to eat. Have a teacher pretend to be the Thing and the children can take turns feeding the food. The children LOVE this story.

The Hungry Thing is a great story about a Thing that comes to a village and wants foods using rhymes. We shorten this book by focusing on the rhyming foods and what the Thing wants to eat. Reading the entire book is too long.

These are simple foods we have made to represent what The Hungry Thing asks for. A teacher wears the sign. When the children figure out the rhyme, they can feed it to The Hungry Thing.

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Activity 2: I'm Thinking Of....

Place a variety of healthy food pictures on the board. Go around to each child and tell them that you are thinking of a healthy food. Say a rhyming word such as "funion" for the food and see if the child can tell you what the food is.