"Put Some Veggies In A Pot..."

We have been talking about plants and how they can provide delicious and nutritious food for our bodies! Thursday we did a taste test experiment of different steamed veggies. We first chopped them up using plastic knives which was hard, but the Tel Aviv kids knew what to do and got the job done! Then we walked the pot full of veggies to the community room to have them steamed...

We had a delicious group snack with all our steamed veggies and some raw veggies. We saw how cooked carrots and raw carrots look and feel different. We encouraged kids to try new foods. If they didn't want to try them, they still had the opportunity to smell them, touch them and learn about the different kinds of vegetables and how they are different cooked than they are raw. Our veggie options included, carrots, red peppers, green beans, broccoli and cauliflower.

After snack, we had the opportunity to chart which vegetables we liked and which ones we didn't. We found a place on the chart to write our names and then could put either a smiley face or check in a b0x to indicate that we liked a certain food or an X to indicate that we didn't. This chart is an early introduction to math skills that they will be continuing to use in elementary school. Kids were able to look at the chart and see that some kids liked all the veggies or that Lily liked carrots. There is a lot of information on the chart, and it is a learning opportunity both to put your own information in the chart as well as look and read the chart as a whole. It was neat to see how invested each child was as they filled it out. Many realized that they hadn't tried the vegetable so they didn't know to mark whether or not they liked it. So we ended up having a second taste test as we were filling out our graph. Micah Gladstone learned he liked ALL the veggies, and he hadn't tried any of them during snack!

It was a great project, and we were excited to see all the healthy foods Tel Aviv kids like. Come on in and check out the chart to  see which new veggies you can introduce to your dinner table!!