V is for Vegetables: Themed Activities

Interesting. Vegetables!  Okay....What shall I say?  Hmmm....Well, vegetables are a big part of a healthy meal and meals are a big part of life and of play.

Option one: Practice colours. Whether real or toy veggies, separate them into different baskets according to their colour.  If you only have one vegetable at a time, name the colour.  Another idea is to describe a vegetable with clues and have them guess which vegetable you are thinking of. Make the first clue the colour of it.

Option two: Make a grocery list and have the children learn the prices and quantities of food and select them from the aisles.  You can begin with cutting and pasting vegetables from flyers onto a sheet or by circling items on the flyer you want and working on understanding money concepts too to determine how much you can buy with the money you have.  Learn to prioritize the shopping list according to greatest need in case the money runs out.  Be sure to have healthy vegetables as a part of the list.

Option three:  Try gardening. Can you plant a vegetable (or herb) and help it grow to the point where you can eat your own produce?  Maybe try sprouting roots such as by putting the top of a carrot in a shallow tray of water or beans on a damp paper towel in a baggie in the sunlight. Help the child(ren) to learn to recognize different seeds and discover what kind of growing conditions it needs, the parts of the plant and its lifecycle. Help them to care for the plants as living things and to also share their produce to bless others with it.

Option four:  Cook vegetables.  Have your child add your chopped veggies into the blender for a smoothie or have them select which vegetable to put on the menu for the night. Let them participate in the process of making a meal with vegetables in it.  Maybe they can mix the salad or put the croutons on top or wash the vegetables, whatever works to include them in both the prep and the eating process.

Option five:  Do arts and crafts with vegetables.  It could be a pencil drawing or a water painting activity.  It could be using paints and stamping patterns with a cut potato or vegetable or dying fabrics with vegetables such as red onions.  It could be making corn husk dolls or fall harvest displays.  It could be carving pumpkins and squash!  

Option six: Count.  It could be counting how many tomatoes are growing on the one vine, guessing how many pumpkins fill the large box in the grocery store or counting how many seeds are in the green pepper (good luck!)  It could be counting your money to see how many veggies you can afford to buy.  To build on these early math skills, another option is to practice measurements and weights.  How long is a cob of corn? How tall does the cornstalk grow? If a pepper and a potato are the same size, are they the same weight? How can you check your guess? Will a kilogram of lettuce weigh the same or less than a kilogram of cucumber?  Can you trick them?

Option seven:  Science activities:  Other than all the science of planting, growing, harvesting and cooking vegetables, what else can you do?  Discover which one makes the best dye is another activity.  You can also do the celery stalks in jars of different colours of water and watch as the stalks change colour as they absorb the water with its dyes.  Play 'sink or float' with various veggies (toy or real) is a fun prediction activity.  Growing 'hair' using chia seeds atop a potato 'head' is another activity.

Option eight:  Read books about vegetables.  There are many styles and titles.  The Big Pumpkin is a great choice.  The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle, Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert, L,M,N, O, Peas by Keith Baker, Veggie Tales books and How my Garden Grows are a sampling of other titles.

Hope these ideas inspire you to come up with even more and to make V is for Vegetables a fun topic for the child(ren) in your life. All ideas are also to inspire our children to make healthy food choices and see the good in vegetables! Using vegetables to decorate your plate for meals, having corn eating contests, seeing which vegetable is the crunchiest and which one feels the squishiest are a few more ideas.  Please share your favourite veggie related idea in the comment section!  Thanks!