12 Ways to Encourage Kids to Play (and learn) With Their Food

Kids are going to play with their food, it’s inevitable.  So, instead of discouraging it, why not dive in?   It doesn’t always mean a large mess to clean later.  We’re showing you how!  You can play and learn with your food with these fun ideas, inspired by Danya Banya!

12 Ways to Encourage Kids to Play (and learn) With Their Food

1.  Cookie letters are a great (and yummy) way to support letter recognition. 2.  Peeling hard boiled eggs is great fine motor skills practice. 3.  Threading is a challenging skill for toddlers. Here are three different ways to practice threading over morning tea. 4.  Make a vegetable skeleton with your favorite veggies. 5.  Practice pre-writing skills by drawing on pumpkins at Halloween. 6.  Older toddlers can practice counting and pattern recognition by making fruit salad skewers. 7.  Make art from food by painting with a pepper!  Cut a pepper into slices and dip into paint to create St. Patrick’s Day shamrocks. 8.  Drawing a family of orange faces develops pre-writing skills and adds a bit of ‘character’ to your fruit bowl. 9.  Baking with young toddlers is a great way to teach a whole host of skills. They learn about different ingredients, what they look like, what they smell like, how to measure, pour, stir, and they get to taste their efforts at the end! 10.  Learn all about math fractions at the lunch table by cutting sandwiches into pieces and matching them with fraction cards. 11.  Establishing a tradition of eating off a “Special Plate” teaches celebration and accomplishment without greed. 12.  Learn letters with alphabet soup.  Let them scoop out the letters they recognize and even place them on a plate to spell.