Healthy Eating: Making Food Traffic Lights

Wednesday September 12th 2018

Who doesn’t love food on a stick?

Our group had spent the morning exploring different types of fruit by making our own traffic light fruit sticks made from red, yellow and green coloured fruit.

There is much learning from handling food:

+ Social-Emotional Development: Hands-on exploration with food helps children develop pride and confidence in their skills and abilities. The act of following a recipe can encourage self-direction and independence, while also teaching children to follow directions and use thinking skills to problem solve.

+ Physical Development: Squeezing, pinching, holding and pushing fruit through a skewer are all skills that help develop a child’s small muscle control and eye-hand coordination. It’s impossible to separate hands-on food activities from physical development for children.

+ Cognitive Development: Following a recipe inspires children’s curiosity, thinking, and problem solving, offering new opportunities to make predictions and observations. Additionally, food activities offer authentic opportunities for children to understand and apply their knowledge of measuring, one-to-one correspondence, numbers, and counting. As they follow a recipe, children organise ingredients, follow a sequence, and carry out multiple directions.

+ Language Development: Having discussions about healthy food is a great opportunity for language development. We enjoyed matching pictures with words and concepts and they were able to articulate questions inspired by their new experiences.

To begin our lesson, we read a delightful story called “End of the Rainbow Fruit Salad.”  It is a simple book that explores colours and numbers, as well as many different types of fruit. From there we looked at a laminated picture of a set of traffic lights. We asked, what do the colours in this picture mean? “You need to stop. The red is stop.” Said Sophie. “You go, you walk.” Said Charlie as he pointed to the green light. “The cars can go and when the red flash you must stop.” Added Michael.

We explained that yellow means to slow down and wait when we get to a traffic light.

From there we encouraged the children to make their own set of traffic lights using the coloured fruit and skewers. The tricky part was figuring out how to eat our fruit off the sticks as well as making sure the fruit held in place when we poked through it. The children were thrilled to be eating their very own edible art.

We hope that having a simple and engaging experience brings about promoting healthy food choices from an early age. What we learned is that food can provide us with a multi-sensory experience that facilitates learning in all areas of development. Through this particular activity we can observe emerging maths skills as the children practiced simple addition, patterning by layering the fruit, organising their ingredients and using representation in their play.

To extend on this experience, we would like to make a fruit smoothie. Our children will be able to take on a physical science investigation by observing the changing forms of fruit from solid to liquid. They will begin to see how to follow a recipe and where food is sourced. We would like to encourage our children to take active part in creating their own meals from scratch to see how it can be made.