Cooking Up a Great Year!

I am really excited to be joining up with an amazing team of bloggers to bring you a smorgasbord of wonderful food based ideas!  There is really a bunch of great ideas in this hop.  Everything from crock pot recipes to creating art with your veggies and fruit.  You will not want to miss this scrumptious selection of tasty treats! 

 

On my blog, you will be exploring emotions and taste with fruits, veggies, and healthy treats!

I got my inspiration from a wonderful book called, "How Are You Peeling?", by Jan Freymann and Joost Elffers.  I LOVE this book!  If you haven't already seen it, the book is all about foods with moods.  Fruits and veggies are given faces with very distinct moods.  The artistry is phenomenal.

It is a fun way to get students thinking about feelings and how each individual can effect others by their actions and moods.  It gives students a safe avenue to explore their own feelings.

It also is a great way to help students understand that every person experiences a variety of feelings every day.  It is so important to let students know that all feelings are OK and it is important to learn how to deal with all the different feelings.

After reading the book, we created our own foods with moods!

We used apples and peaches.  That was what the kids chose.  I provided a variety of fun stickers with different eyes.  I believe that these eyes were from Oriental Trading. The great thing about these eyes is they already suggest different feelings.  The kids were able to select a set of eyes to inspire their feelings face.

They stuck the eyes on the fruit and used a toothpick to create the rest of the face.  My 4 year old was able to create both a happy and sad face with just a sticker and a toothpick.

 We created a two feelings on each fruit.  Each child chose a "comfortable" and "uncomfortable" feeling.  Some kids chose happy and sad, others happy and mad.  All identified happy as their "comfortable" feeling.

I emphasize "comfortable" and "uncomfortable" feelings, because I want children to understand that all feelings are OK.  Children should not feel as though they are not allowed to feel sad or mad.  It is our job as parents and educators to teach children HOW to deal with these feelings.

 The kids had a great time creating their foods with moods and using the fruits to play act different scenarios with their different moods.

After creating our foods with moods, we took off the stickers, washed REALLY well, and ate our creations.  Delicious!

This brings us to the second part of our interactions with foods.  We talked about all the different ways that foods can taste.  We discussed that foods can have multiple tastes, just like we can have multiple feelings.

I gathered a bunch of different foods for us to taste.  We had no allergies, so our possibilities were endless!

 We used apples, pretzels, bananas, carrots, lemons, and radishes.

 We used a blindfold, but you don't have to include this step.  We used the blindfold to help the students really focus in on the taste of each food.  They were able to identify the taste without already knowing the type of food.  Carrots were identified as sweet and sour.  Interesting results!

Even the pickiest kids were willing to try all the fruits and veggies, when it was presented as a game!  That doesn't mean that they liked them all!!!

After tasting each food, the kids were able to put the picture of the food on the graph.  I only worked with a few kids, so they tried each type of food.  If you have an entire class, you can give each student only one or two foods to try.

We completed our graph on the floor, but it would probably work better on chart paper.  We were on vacation, so I didn't have access to any chart paper :)

 You can get a free set of all the graphing labels here.

Need some more ideas for teaching feelings with young children?  I just created a "Rainbow of Feelings" unit with my mom.  She is a retired elementary school guidance counselor AND puppeteer extraordinaire :)  Together, we created some fun resources to use with your kids!  Find the unit here.

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