Happy Friday. Happy FOODIE Friday to be exact. This bundle has a bunch of food themed suggestions for the weekend including favorite snacks and books from each classroom!
We do want to remind you that we are not asking you to go to the grocery store to get a bunch of new things, use what you have and don’t worry about the rest. The recommendation is still to “shelter in place” as much as possible.
FAVORITE SNACKS
(Compiled by each classroom’s teachers)
Here is a list of the favorite snacks we serve at school if you are running out of ideas for what to eat at home. Some of their favorites might surprise you!
But again, we do not want to encourage you to go out right now to get all of these things. Use what you have or add some of them to a grocery list for when you absolutely have to go next time.
Apple Chips: https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/235537/baked-apple-chips/
Roasted Chick Peas: https://www.loveandlemons.com/roasted-chickpeas/
Frozen peas: crunchy, cold and tasty. Blend with olive oil and a pinch of salt to make Pea Hummus.
Bean dip (chick pea or black bean): mash up, add a little olive oil and garlic
Fruits/veggies with any nut butter (we use sunbutter at school): use a peeler to make apple spaghetti strings or carrots spaghetti strings. It’s a fun way to present fruits and veggies
Hard boil eggs
Scramble eggs with cheese, veggies: put them in muffin tins and bake at 350 degrees.
Smoothies: add fruit, yogurt, ice, nut butter.
Trail Mix (Blue Preschool favorite): add cheerios, raisins, goldfish also adapt with your families favorites, chocolate chips
Tip: Trail mix would be a fun snack to make into a sorting activity. While you are eating, make piles of each of the different items, maybe count them too! What is there most of? What is the smallest pile?
English Muffin Pizzas (Toddler/Preschool favorite lunch): Everyone can make their own. Get creative.
Oat Cakes (YT favorite):
Ingredients:
Smashed banana
oats
coconut oil (or butter)
cinnamon
optional to add nuts, raisins, chocolate chips, nut butter (might add more oats), whatever you like!
Directions:
It’s a 1:1 ratio, banana to oats, and everything else is free-hand (approximately a Tablespoon or more of oil/butter)
Mix it in a gallon plastic bag and smash or mix in a bowl
Mix all ingredients together and let sit for 10+ minutes
Scoop into “cakes” and bake at 300 for 5-8 minutes
Oatmeal (infant favorite): just quick oats cooked in milk in microwave, add chopped fruit like berries or apples or yogurt
SNACK LUNCH
This is just a fun idea to present your regular lunch in a new and exciting way! Presenting their food like this might encourage your infants, toddlers and preschoolers to try something you serve that they typically avoid.
Even more, this is a great fine motor activity to motivate children to carefully use their fingers to get those tiny items out of the tray and into their mouth.
This might also be a fun way to have a snack in the blanket fort you built yesterday!
PAINTED TOAST
BCS has made a commitment to not use food in any play that would make it inedible. We feel that it would send mixed messages to children when we encourage them to not be wasteful but then waste food for play. Not everyone in the world is lucky enough to have plenty of food to eat, let alone extra food to play with.
Good news is that this art activity is also EDIBLE! So you can eat your art and not waste a thing. Woo hoo!
Ingredients:
Sliced bread
Milk
Food coloring
Directions:
Fill shallow glasses with a small amount of milk in each.
Take your food colorings and in each glass put 5 drops of food coloring in the milk and stir till color shows.
Use a small paint brush (make sure it’s clean!) and dip the brush into the food coloring.
Then take a piece of bread and paint a picture on it.
Place the bread into a toaster and wait till the bread is lightly toasted.
Butter lightly to give taste if you want.
Enjoy your masterpiece!
DRAMATIC PLAY IN THE KITCHEN WITH YOU!
Children of all ages love dramatic play. They feel a strong connection to their families while engaging in ‘real life’ play. They gain so many skills as they practice life. There is the social aspect as they play with others but also the physical skills of the specific play and reinforcing family rituals, routines and traditions!
Children are more likely to be adventurous eaters if they spend time in the kitchen.
There are so many options of ways to spend time in the kitchen with your children.
BCS Babies love playing with real kitchen items.
They will happily bang on pots and pans.
Dump and Fill kitchen containers with anything you are willing to use
Transferring items is an important developmental activity
Bonus: a precursor to cleaning up!
Toddlers and Preschoolers enjoy doing a task with or at the same time (parallel) as their families.
Give them a bin to ‘wash’ dishes in while you cook or clean up
Move their kitchen play set into the family kitchen while you cook
Place a stool or chair at the sink and have them ‘help’ with dishes
Do a cooking project together.
Children of all ages enjoy starting a band using kitchen gadgets. It is so fun to make music together.
You can explore volume/speed control by offering different challenges
“Bang your loudest!”, “Now quietly…”
“So fast”, “Now sloooowly….”
Support social development by introducing turn taking. Even our youngest classrooms at BCS introduce the concept of taking turns.
“Turn” in Sign Language:
Even infants can start signing “turn” to request a turn.
FOOD COLLAGE
Use old magazines, newspaper ad inserts and whatever else you can think of and cut out pictures of food. Make collages and paste them together for a fun and simple art project.
Supplies:
magazines, newspapers, fliers, etc
scissors
glue sticks
paper
Directions:
Cut out all the pictures of food you can find
Glue to another piece of paper
Tips: Maybe only find the brown foods or all the red foods. Maybe look for only foods you have never tried, or only foods you have tried. Maybe make your food collage into a rainbow.
FAVORITE FOOD BOOK READ ALOUDS
Here is a compilation of favorite books from each classroom that talk about food! Hope they don’t make you feel too hungry. The links to the read aloud videos are listed below.
Arnie the Doughnut by Laurie Keller
The Runaway Pancake by John Lithgow
This is a silly one. I would not recommend this as a wind down story before rest time. I might have made that mistake a time or two.
Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban
This one makes a strong case for trying new foods.
Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
This is a favorite of the Green Preschool. Feel free to pause the video on each food page to count and name the foods together.
Here is a very calm version that the Green Preschool loves to listen to while laying down to rest:
Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss
Bilal Cooks Daal by Aisha Saeed
Read by the author herself!
Strega Nona by Tommie dePaola
This one teaches a great lesson about how important it is to listen to instructions. No one wants to feel like Big Anthony on the last page of the book.
“The Good Egg” by Jory John
This book (along with The Bad Seed by the same author) always leads to discussions about what it means to be “good” or “bad.” We usually avoid those words when it comes to describing people, because no one can be only good or bad. We are all a mixture of dark and light. However, it is still a conversation that preschoolers come back to again and again in their play and conversations. So it’s one we try to face head on!
Does doing one bad thing make you all “bad?”
Does taking care of yourself first mean you aren’t “good?”
If you make a mistake, does it mean you are “bad?”
Why do you think the egg got cracks in their shell?
Can you feel good and bad at the same time?
Have a great weekend! We love you all!
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