Explore other ways to connect Canada’s food guide to core knowledge and skill subjects. Exposing children to a variety of foods can help them become familiar with these items and provide opportunities for natural conversations about food and eating. Try these additional learning activities to support learning.
Tip: These activities are intended to support children’s learning in a variety of settings. They should not be interpreted as curriculum. Visit your province or territory’s ministry or department of education for information on curriculum.
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Arts
Place a bowl with foods, such as vegetables and fruits, for all children to see. Challenge them to use chalk or pastels to draw the foods, while paying particular attention to representing their shape and texture.
Invite children to imagine how this food would be served, such as with herbs and spices. Ask them to use mixed media to decorate and add texture to their drawing, such as:
- recycled tinfoil for a baking sheet
- beads or sequins for herbs and spices
- recycled Styrofoam for an orange peel
Science
Use food scraps to regrow food or plants with your group, or modify their colour. For example, you can regrow:
- avocado pits
- pineapple crowns
- stems from celery, green onions, or romaine lettuce
You can also add food dyes to glasses of water and add celery stalks.
Invite children to monitor the growth of their food scraps, or the colour change of the celery stalks as they draw water. Invite them to write down their observations.
Mathematics
Use food items and recipes to explore equations and other mathematics with children. For example:
- Use recipe measurements to explore fractions.
- Provide children with a variety of food items. Ask children to:
- estimate their weight
- weigh them
- record their findings
- calculate the difference between their estimate and the real weight of each food item
- Create food problems using whole numbers for children to solve. For example:
- You need 37 eggs. If 1 egg carton holds 12 eggs, how many cartons will you need?
Social studies
Invite children to select different regions from around the world. Ask them to explore:
- food celebrations and traditions from those regions
- foods that are traditionally grown or produced in those regions
Encourage children to reflect on the different foods available in those regions and how they may have helped shaped the food cultures and traditions.
Language arts
Challenge children to write a fable about a food item. Ask them to:
- include a moral of the story
- include information about how the food item is grown
- give the food item human qualities, such as a name and personality
- include information about how the food is prepared, including foods from other groupings
Invite children to read their stories in pairs or to the group.
Physical education
Find pictures of foods that children may have never tried before. Aim for about 10 different items. Make 2 to 3 copies of each item and place them face down around the space.
On chart paper, put a picture of each food item and assign a movement to it. For example:
- chayote, 5 squats
- rambutan, 5 vertical jumps
- cassava, 10 high knees
- dragon fruit, 5 long jumps
- fiddleheads, 5 side shuffles
Children are to move around the space, pick up a food card, and do the movement associated with it. After doing the movement, children can turn the card back over and move to a different card. Modify the movements for your group as required.
Second language studies
Provide students with the Canada’s food guide snapshot and explore using the second language to review it.
Invite children to enjoy a snack with a few others from the group, and to engage in conversation about the snapshot using their second language.
