So we’ve been out of the picture for a
while with the cold weather and Christmas break, but we’re back out in the city
starting our outreach events!
This past Friday we were at Rickson Ridge
Elementary School doing two nutrition workshops with some awesome children. In
the morning, we were in Ms. Cloutier’s grade 1/2 class and after the nutrition
break we went to Ms. McKenzie’s grade 1 class. The children were all very
excited for our visit, possibly due to all the educational games we brought in!
We started by talking about what healthy eating means and discussing Canada’s
Food Guide. Then we used the balanced
plate model to engage the children in an activity of drawing to create their
own balanced plate with favourite foods. Rebecca then created a talking circle
to teach the children about local food and sustainability. This was a new topic
for many of children and they were very interested about what food were local
and which weren’t. This led us into a game of vegetable and fruit bingo, and
when each food was called out the children answered whether the item was
local. The children were all very
knowledgeable when we discussed energy dense versus empty food and played a
game of “Go, Slow, Woah.”
To finish off our morning of fun, we had a
series of four stations for the children to rotate though in groups and receive
a puzzle piece to complete at the end of the stations. Station one was riddles
with Rachael, solving some fun riddles related to different vegetable and
fruit. Station three was spirit vegetable with Lindsay and myself, discussing
if you were a vegetable, which one would you be? We had some pretty awesome
answers such as: “A pea on a pod, because they’re just hanging out, like me and
my friends!” Then they were able to get
their energy out at the vegetable/fruit yoga station with Steph getting
creative with poses such as banana, peel the banana and banana split! The final
station was creating a pledge about healthy eating on a leaf, which we then
taped to a tree to create a growing tree of healthy eating goals!
Overall, the day was a huge success with
everyone getting involved with engaging games and learning at the same time!
One of the students learned that peanut butter could be in the middle of the
other and meat and alternative food group. I know our team did some learning as
well, we were surprised by how knowledge the group of students was! We can’t
wait for our next outreach event!
