Healthy Me Activities For Preschool. Getting children to eat healthy fruit and vegetables can be the hardest thing as a parent because they do not understand the benefits of these foods. It can be even harder if you don’t eat many healthy foods. We have created a free ‘Healthy Me Activities For Preschool for your child to go through and complete. By the end, they will be a fruit and vegetable pro. The pack is full of fun and easy activities for your wee one to help them understand the importance of fruit and vegetables in their diet.
Colour Match
This free downloadable activity encourages children to match the different coloured fruit to the correct coloured box. There are only four colours to work with, but it is the perfect way to help your child understand what colours fruit and veg are in the supermarket. The colours are eye-catching which will stick in your child’s mind. You will not need anything else apart from a gluestick to stick each cut out to the correct box. It is advised that parents cut out the fruit and vegetable shapes if you have younger children.
Sorting Fruit and Vegetables
Older children will have loads of fun with this activity. Cut out the fruit and vegetables and place them in the correct box. This activity helps children identify the difference between fruit and vegetables. You could also try to discuss with your child some of the common characteristics between the two categories. Can you get them all because I got some wrong!
Counting Fruits
If your child is still learning to count, I urge you to try this activity with them. This free downloadable sheet helps visualise numbers into items instead of using their fingers. First get them to name each fruit, and then match each number to the fruits. I would advise starting with the lower number first, so that your child understand how lower quantities look before attempting the higher numbers. Unless you have a child like mine who kept trying to eat each one.
Read and Match
This free activity helps your child put words to pictures by reading the vegetable names out loud and drawing a line to the correct picture. I love that the pictures are very child friendly. This free sheet develops your child’s mind to help them understand what their favourite fruit or vegetable word looks like. For older children that have just started writing you could get them to write out the word themselves afterwards, so they are more comfortable with it.
Which One is Different
Who doesn’t love a game of spot the difference? This sheet gets your child to circle the odd one out in each row of fruit and veg. It is very clever because even though it seems like a simple task it helps to make your child aware that each of these items can come in different variation and alerts them to the difference between each one. For instance, I had to explain to my little one that even though watermelon is pink on the inside, there is melon in yellow and orange colours.
Healthy Shopping
Healthy Shopping is the perfect activity to get your child to think about the correct choices. This activity helps them understand what the good choices are and they will feel super proud when they have picked the right options. They will always want to pick chocolate, but ask them questions such as ‘Why do you think this is healthy?’ or ‘Why did you pick this one’ helps you understand why they are making certain choices. You can even ask them what sort of items mummy and daddy should be buying instead if you are like me and have a taste for sugar.
What Comes Next?
This sheet develops the understanding of patterns by using different vegetables, colours and fruits to create the sequence. For younger children just cut out the pieces on the bottom of the sheet and arrange them to match the patterns, but for the older children who have a passion for colouring and drawing you can do it differently. To take it further let you child draw and colour their own fruit or veg that they think comes next in the pattern.
I Spy Something Healthy
A counting game for all ages. This activity encourages to play with numbers by counting each vegetable that is scattered across the sheet. I was excited because it features pumpkins which I just love. The different vegetables will spike their interest and encourage them to play and learn with numbers in a picture form.
And trust me, you will lose count more than once.
Fruit Maze
This task brings me back to the time when I was a child in a sweetcorn maze. It was endless hours of fun and this Fruit Maze will be too from the comfort of your own home. The aim is to find the perfect route where the girl can collect all the fruits in the maze. This downloadable activity is recommended to older children, but you can always get your child to move your pen along with you if you have children that don’t quite understand how a maze works, like my little girl.
Word Search
Now we are talking, I used to go through whole books of word searches because they can guarantee hours of fun. There are 10 food items for your child to find. This will help them to remember the spellings of each food so they can search for them in the word search. For younger children, this will take them a while to do. Once they have completed that, get them to create their own word search around food items. You could adapt the Wordsearch around a theme/ different color foods/ foods in your household to make them think about the variety of items that are available to them.
I hope you find these sheets super useful and the aim is to simply have plenty of fun with them. Healthy Me Activities For Preschool
Stay safe everyone,
Tempany Grace