Wellness: Eat Play Grow

Learn to use the five senses in order to understand how to listen to the body's nutritional and physical activity needs.

Activities:

• Place three different foods on a plate. Help your child describe how each food tastes, feels, and looks.
• Try 3 new fruits or vegetables with your child this week.

Learn the importance of eating a variety of fruits every day.

Activities:

• Movement/music - Children and adults move creatively: roll like apples and oranges, peel like bananas, hang like cherries, bunch like grapes.
• Eat 3 fruit servings every day.

Learn the concept of balancing the amount of energy consumed and the energy used.

Activities:

• Art project: Children select images of their favorite physical activities to glue on 1 side of a seesaw graphic and then select healthy GO foods to place on the other side.
• Add 10 minutes of physical activity and 1 GO food every day.

Learn about the importance of portion control to maintain a healthy weight.

Activities:

• Help your child compare and contrast the concepts of scale: large and small. Big and little movements enhance a child's understanding of the concepts of scale and size. Use a variety of colored scarves to help children practice high and low, big and small movements as you dance to your favorite music.
• Prepare three dinners that use the portion plate.

Learn the three We Can! food categories: GO (foods that should be eaten often), SLOW (foods that should be eaten sometimes), and WHOA (foods that should be eaten sparingly) and how to recognize foods that are the better choices for a healthy body.

Activities:

• Make a collage of all types of foods and identify them in GO SLOW WHOA categories
• List 1 to 3 Go foods that you will eat each day.

Learn how important daily physical activity is for maintaining health.

Activities:

• Reduce screen time to increase activity time.
• 60 minutes of daily activity (walking, dancing, jumping, playing hopscotch, yoga to name just a few!)

Learn the importance of eating a variety of vegetables every day.

Activities:

• Movement/music: Children and adults imitate movements to show how vegetables grow (standing on tiptoes to pick corn, digging in the ground for carrots, rolling on the floor like a pumpkin).
• Add 1 more serving of vegetables a day.

Learn the importance of calcium in building strong bones.

Activities:

• Movement/music: Do activities and sing songs that encourage isolated movements to highlight  bones. Songs: Dem Bones, Head & Shoulders, Simon Says, Open Shut Them, Hokey Pokey, Itsy Bitsy Spider, and Five Little Monkeys.
• Consume enough calcium every day.

Learn the importance of working together to create a healthy, affordable, and easy to make meal.

Activities:

• Give children the responsibility of helping you choose the fruits and vegetables for the week. Help them practice counting skills and color recognition.
• Have two or more family-style meals together this week.

Learn the importance of making healthy beverage choices for a healthy body.

Activities:

• Bathtub fun - Help children develop science and math skills as they use a variety of plastic containers to measure and pour during bath time.
• Replace regular soda and sugar-sweetened drinks with water or fat-free or low-fat milk.

Learn the importance of getting healthy sleep.

Activities:

• Turn off the TV before bedtime and read a book together in bed.
• Develop a family bedtime routine.