I am so excited this week to be asked to join my bloggy friends in co-hosting a weekly series called Kids in the Kitchen!  

Each week they post great ideas to have the kids help out in the kitchen – from preparing meals together, making fun crafts out of paper plates and the such, learning how to count with food, having a tea party- the possibilities are endless.  Each Friday  my co-hosts and I will share with you some wonderful ideas, and you can also link up your own posts below.

I love that I am joining in on the link up while my daughter is young (16 months,) and although she cannot handle any of the actual cooking or baking, there are a lot of things she can help me with in the kitchen and ways for me to engage her, help her learn, and make some memories along the way. 

This week I’ve got a fun way to teach kids about colors, sizes, shapes, and textures, as well as a great game to do with them involving your local grocery store circular.  

For this activity you’ll want to gather up an array of different colored, shaped, sized, and textured fruits and veggies, and a store circular.

At home we have an extensive vegetable garden and also some wonderful fruit trees, and together we go outside each day and harvest what is ready.

 I also incorporate many of the days picks into our meals throughout the week, and cannot wait to share some of those recipes with you in the future.

For this activity if you don’t have any homegrown fruits or veggies to pick that’s okay, take a trip to the market together and choose them together.  Ask your child to help you find a red fruit, purple vegetable, something round, something hard, etc.  

Once you have gathered your veggies and fruits, lay them out on your table or on trays.  Make sure to scatter the colors, sizes, shapes, and textures.  Here’s what our mix looked like before we got started.

Some of these colors just amaze me!

Some people call this variety of yellow squash the “warty” one and for good reason.  This is a fun veggie to talk about textures with your child.

The first step in the activity is to work on sorting the veggies and fruits by colors.   We went down the line from yellows to greens to oranges to reds.  While they are working on sorting talk about the sizes, shapes and textures of them.

 We then went back through and sorted them by sizes, from small to large, large to small.

Don’t be surprised if they reach for some of the items to taste them.  My daughter was quick to grab the strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries… and, well, I don’t blame her!

She also was quick to feel how soft the peach really was… was it soft enough for her to get her fingers in it?!  I’ll let you see for yourself in the next photo…

There are no rules to this, let them explore the different colors, sizes, shapes and textures.  

For extra fun, grab your local grocery store circular.  Ours was having a feature on locally grown produce this week so they had a ton of the items we were using inside.  Grab a crayon or marker too!

Have your child look through the circular and circle the items that you have on-hand.  Ask them to help you find the red tomatoes on the table and in the circular.  Can they spot the yellow corn?  How about the round peaches?

My daughter was excited to see the items that we had on the table in print.  You can see her enjoying the strawberry in her right hand and crayon in left circling the strawberries in print.  She sure didn’t miss a beat with this one!

We had a wonderful time and enjoying doing this activity together.   You can also do other versions of this activity using items you have in your cardboard, and having your child look for and identify them in your grocery circular.

In this activity your child is learning about the different colors, sizes, shapes, and textures of veggies and fruits.  It is also a great time to talk to them about why eating an array of different colored fruits and veggies is important.

So grab your veggies, fruits, and circular and have fun learning!  Here’s some further information about Kids in the Kitchen and how you can link-up:

KIDS IN THE KITCHEN

Come join me and my co-hosts, Melinda of LookWhatMomFound…andDadtoo!, Sarah of Play to Learn with Sarah, Paula at Frosted Fingers, Sara at Sensibly Sara, Reesa at Momma Lew, and Jeannette from EcoIncognito each week linking up a post, new or old, that feature the theme Kids in the Kitchen. It doesn’t matter what you are doing as long as you are doing it together, enjoying it and learning something along the way.

– picking fruit and using in recipes

– preparing healthy snacks

– having a tea party

– trying a new recipe together

– pouring from measuring cups

– creating new family friendly recipes

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