How to Teach Young Children About Fruits & Vegetables

Young children can be taught many new items or ideas through repetition. For example, if your child hasn't learned about fruits yet, you could teach her or him about fruit.

Things You'll Need

• all materials possible...the fruits themselves
• pictures of fruit
• books and stories about fruit
• food pyramid

Instructions

1. 

   Talk to a librarian locally, or at your favorite library. They could even be someone at a bookstore, like Barnes & Noble. Find books that talk about fruit, or show pictures of fruit. My children have enjoyed the English-Spanish Foundations Series book called Fruits and Vegetables Volume 10 by Gladys Roas-Mendoza. They not only teach about many fruits and vegetables in a very simple way, but offer Spanish as well. What a bonus! My children are learning Spanish and fruit at the same time! Great, huh? The illustrations are great and resemble actual fruit.

2. 

   There are also some really fantastic, clever and fun books by Saxton Freymann and Joost that can teach children about fruit. "How Are You Peeling: Foods With Moods" is a really great book that shows children characters made by fruit and vegetables. Another excellent book by the same author's is "Food For Thought: The Complete Book of Concepts for the Growing Mind." This has cleverly made characters and animals from fruits and veggies. There are quite a few others in the series if you'd like to see more of these fruit and veggie characters, and as a bonus, your kids learn about emotions, shapes, colors, sizes and other skills and such that can only help them.

3. 

   Play games or pretend play with your children, or students, using plastic pretend fruit & veggies. You should also most definitely add in thee actual fruit from time to time. Or just talk about it during a meal or during snack time! Two birds, one stone!

4. 

   Talk about different characteristics of the fruits and vegetables. When doing this, you'd want to discuss sizes, shapes, lengths, texture and color.

5. 

   Talk about things that happen with your senses when you eat certain fruits and vegetables. What does it taste like? Do you want to sneeze when you eat it? Does it have a sound that it makes when you bite into it or when you knock on it? What does it smell like when it's cut open, peeled or squeezed? Do you feel happy and more awake after smelling an orange? Does it feel firm or squishy? These are all perfectly good ideas for questions to talk about with your children or students.

6. 

   Have children create collages from grocery advertisements. Or you could print clip art and distribute that once you cut it out for them. They can create collages that are about certain colors of fruit, or certain textures, or even certain shapes.

7. 

   Have children brainstorm about what they already know about fruit, and what they'd like to find out about fruit.

8. Show children the new food pyramid and explain to them why fruit is listed. Explain all of the helpful vitamins contained in the fruits and the benefits that we receive from this type of food.

Tips & Warnings

• Grocery stores, the internet, and books are second best to the actual fruit, but do remarkably well instead of creating a sticky or other kind of mess!