Oh! how our toddlers love to eat! Thank you all for bringing us such delicious, nutritious snacks for the toddlers to eat each week. I know you often see written on our daily activity chart that your child has eaten or prepared snack, and I wanted to give you a little more detail about that.
The toddlers are involved in every aspect of food preparation in our community. Each week when we send home a shopping list for the snack family, our hope is that you will find some time to go to the grocery store with your toddler and let them help to pick out the snack items. Children love to be involved in the process of shopping, getting to pick out beautiful yellow bananas, or crunchy orange carrots. Once you and your toddler bring those snacks to school, the snack making process begins. It starts simply with looking in the bags to see what yummy things we will be preparing. We usually have 1 or 2 (sometimes 3) children help to put all the groceries away (whether it’s taking frozen berries to the freezer, carrying the bananas so carefully, “just like a baby,” or rolling the big melon to the snack table).
Mondays often bring flowers to school; so of course, a few children will work on trimming the stems to fit in our tiny vases. Once these chores are done it is time for the actual preparation of the food. This can include pouring milk for smoothies, washing pears, slicing bananas, mixing muffin batter, peeling a clementine, spreading sun butter and jelly on bread, filling pitchers with water and on and on. . . During this preparation we have many conversations about the food we are going to eat. What color is it? Does it have seeds? Do we eat those seeds? Can we eat the peel? What does it smell like? Feel like?
There is also a story that I like to tell about the fruits and veggies we are eating. For example, if we are eating apples that day, I will hold up one apple and ask the children “Where do you think this apple grows?” I get all sorts of answers, such as, tree, bush, on the ground, home etc. Then I give the answer. I hold up the apple and say, “Way up high in an apple tree, then a farmer came along and he picked this apple, put it in a box, and drove it to the store. Then Michael and his mom went to the store and bought these apples and brought them to school.” Afterwards, we take turns washing and cutting the apples.
You may be asking yourselves, why is there so much involved with snack and food preparation? We look at food as an opportunity for education. Food activities promote language development, feelings of value (I’m contributing to my class), development of movement and coordination, developing social graces and promoting a strong sense of community in our community. Food activities also give children a basic understanding of certain mathematical relationships. Children experience the concept of 1 to 1 relationships while setting the table. They also experience that zero as a place holder concept while setting the table when there is a child missing. That child will still have a place and it will be represented by the” 0” placeholder that is sewn into the table cloth.
So the next time you see that your child ate snack, or helped to prepare it, remember there is a lot more involved than just eating! Next month I will tell you about the clean-up process.

Sincerely,
Erin