Eating The Rainbow
A fun way to develop healthy eating habits, mathematical skills and develop further vocabulary.
You will need:
• Paper and a pen to create a shopping list
• A variety of coloured fruit
• A bowl
• A lemon squeezer
• Two knives - a mealtime one for your little one and a sharp one for yourself
Making the activity:
1. Prepare a shopping list together to buy the rainbow of fruits for your fruit salad.
2. Ask your little one to help you think of the different colours of the rainbow and which fruits to buy.
3. Assemble your purchased fruits and, together, arrange them by colour to ensure a rainbow effect.
4. Talk about the different textures, shapes, colours and smells.
5. Cut up the fruits together and add to the bowl. Do this whilst talking about what’s inside the different fruits as they are cut open, using different vocabulary.
6. Talk about cutting bananas into finger shapes as well as grapes and berries in half, to ensure everyone stays safe.
7. Cut the orange in half and squeeze the juice to pour over the prepared fruit.
8. Share and enjoy eating the rainbow with family and friends.
How this supports knowledge and development:
Involving children in shopping for and preparing the food is a great way to encourage them to try out new foods, especially the healthier options. Talk with your child about how Vitamin C in the rainbow fruits helps us to grow and develop and stay healthy. Also, talk about how this helps speed up the repairing of cuts and scratches on our skin, a bit like a magic plaster.
EXTEND THE ACTIVITY - Sorting fruits by colour, texture and shape is a valuable mathematical skill. Sorting skills can be extended by sorting by type – e.g. all berries, all smooth skin fruit, all fruit you can peel, all fruit with a stalk. The cutting of fruits is an early mathematical experience of fractions, as a whole fruit is cut in half and then in quarters. The transformation from one to two to four – all the better for sharing.
