Healthy nutrition and our daughter
As we all know, nutrition is super important and we can thrive best when we take healthy nutrition to ourselves. I personally have not been doing that well on eating healthy during a huge part of my life, but luckily I can say that we (my boyfriend included) have made a change in that after some health problems came peeking in our lives. For our daughter, I hope we can avoid learning the lessons after the harm has been done but teach her early.
This may be the biggest challenge I'm having regarding educating her, as she's pretty stubborn. She has had a few good months when she was very interested in trying all veggies and other foods that I offered her, last winter this was all undone and we seemed to have gone back to before her interest in those healthy things. She can be quite a challenge when trying to convince her, that I'm now turning things around and aiming at educating her about nutrition so that she can gain interest in food and hopefully finally adapts her response when we offer her something healthy.
I'm not worried about her health (yet), but well aware that something structurally needs to change to turn this around. So I collected a bunch of videos about healthy food and will let her watch them first to see where her interest is at.
Lesson material and set up
I'm collected several videos online about healthy foods, which she can watch on her own.
After this, we start with the worksheets I picked online.
Worksheets used:
https://preschool365.com/healthy-foods/
As you can see, you have a few options to chose from.
After this, we will look into our freezer to find some vegetables we've discussed and see if there's any of them that she now finds interesting to try again. (fingers crossed!)
The actual class
The little lady was a bit annoyed that she had to watch videos about nutrition, my boyfriend was the one instructing her to check them out as he's always up really early with her and said give the links to me, I'll make sure she'll watch them before you are awake. How convenient!
When I woke up about 45 minutes later, she was quite annoyed and mostly saying I don't want to watch this, etc. But, I told her to watch it so we can do a fun class where she could color the worksheets as well, then her mood changed.
Today we made this work altogether, it was a true family effort! <3
I started with the fun part: coloring
I first asked her what she saw in the drawings, luckily she recognized them all, only the sweets were a bit unclear, which is not a problem. After I went through all the things on the sheets, she got to color them to her liking:
Time to color the healthy and unhealthy symbols...
I have to admit, that at this point I didn't even realize that this worksheet could have some arguable healthy/unhealthy things on them, depending on personal diet / experience / view on nutrition. If I speak for our family alone, we have tried different things like Keto/Carnivore and Vegetarian for a diet to discover the foods that were causing health issues, and for all of these diets mentioned, I can name pros and cons. Therefore I find it hard to pick sides for something like bacon, as it depends on your diet.
My boyfriend ate a lot of bacon while on a carnivore diet, and guess what? It was one of the few things that his body accepted without giving him a hard time processing the food. So I may be biased in a way, but in our family, currently, I'm picking the bacon for healthy, while I'm fully aware of the fact that it may not be seen as healthy to most people.
I noticed the arguable healthy/unhealthy drawings by having one short for the healthy one and one extra for the unhealthy one. It's all good though, you can totally fill in this exercise as you please fitting to your family's beliefs!
Time to pick sides (lol)
This is where we agreed on, she did quite well if you ask me!
The next worksheet had the same order, first color the food and drinks to her liking, cutting them out, and placing them in the column of "Eat more of" or "Eat less of".
Again, a little room for discussion is possible. But I'm very proud of how she sat down to work on these sheets.
Practicing eating vegetables
After these fun sheets, I said to her that we were going to check the freezer and see if she finds one of the vegetables interesting. I named them and showed her which ones we have in there, she decided that she wanted to try green beans again. Today I'm preparing them for dinner and she promised she'd try them without a fuzz. Let's see how that goes later! To be sure, I'm adding another sort of veggies so she has a choice. That often helps!
Follow up classes
I'm going to do an art class with her about vegetables and fruit. She can be all creative using paint with the topic: healthy nutrition.
Field trip plans: fruit picking farms (I checked the season-opening dates but all expected from June and later). I've set reminders in my calendar so we won't miss this fun part of education!
In case you have cool tips for nutrition field trips (5-year-old) please leave a comment!
I hope you liked this class, and if you have any cool tips for future nutrition classes and/or resources to check out, please let me know in a comment!