Rickson Ridge Outreach Day Grade 1/2

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!