Information on a new vaccine available to girls to help combat cervical cancer
Tips on what to use and avoid for babies at bath time
Fun food projects
Suzannah Olivier, author of Healthy Food for Happy Kids, gives fun ideas on helping your children learn about food and its origins
An awful lot of children, particularly urban ones, grow up having no idea where food comes from or how it grows. Yet if nobody teaches them any different, this should come as no surprise. Encourage your child to learn about food with a variety of projects
Grow some food from seeds, even if you only have a plant pot or windowbox. By learning about the needs of plants a child learns that we need many of the same things - nurturing, water, food, light, the right environment, and so on. And the quality of what we put into the food we grow also makes a difference to the quality of food we put into ourselves. Even in a very restricted space you could grow: cress, herbs, or sprouts from pulses (mung beans and lentils). Ideal for this are BioSnacky seeds (germinators are also available), available from Bioforce at www.bioforce.co.uk or by calling 0800 085 0803.
Little growers
If you have a little more space, such as a balcony, you could grow a tomato plant in a small growbag, or onions and cabbages in pots. Break a garlic head into its cloves and plant each one. Eventually, by magic, these will each develop into a new garlic head.
Other, very satisfying things to grow, which give the fast and/or spectacular results children appreciate include radishes (they grow in four weeks), sunflowers (which grow really tall - not a food, but fun), and marrows and pumpkins, which grow huge (you need space for these). With small children you will need to remind them to water the plants regularly and will probably have to help them do so.
Vegetable planner
Make your own five-a-day chart. Cut out pictures of different fruits and vegetables from different magazines. Divide them into colour groups. The purple group might include red cabbage, aubergines, black grapes, blueberries, figs, kidney beans, and so on. Make a yellow group, and red, green and orange groups. Make collages and stick them to the fridge door. Then, using plain fridge magnets marked with your child's name, let them add a magnet to each chart when they eat a fruit or veg from that group. The ideal is one of each group each day. If you are feeling extravagant, you could buy enough magnets to last the whole week and see, together, how it pans out over a week. Children love keeping score.
Another five-a-day idea is to get your child to draw around their hand on a sheet of paper. Five fingers, one for each portion. Colour the outline in pretty patterns. Stick the page on the fridge. As each portion is eaten, stick a fridge magnet on each finger. Start again the next day.
Out and about
Activities for outings (depending on whether you live in a town or can get to the countryside) could include:
- A visit to a windmill to see how grain was processed in earlier days.
- Asking in a small bakery if you can visit to see how bread is made today.
- A birthday party at a pizza restaurant where the children can make their own pizzas, starting with kneading the dough.
- Going to a pick-your-own farm.
- Some farms do guided tours. Contact the Soil Association for information on this at www.soilassociation.org or call 0117 929 0661.
- Gathering seasonal wild food in the countryside. Blackberries are a particular favourite, but you can also gather elderflowers in the spring to make cordial. Even (unsprayed) nettles make a delicious soup (take gloves!). With all wild food gathering, it is important to correctly identify foods before eating them.
printer friendly
send to a friend
Delicious
Digg
reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Horoscopes| Message Boards | Quizzes | Newsletters | Join
iVillage Ltd is a UK company registered in England & Wales (3837269) at 80-110 New Oxford Street, London WC1 1HB
