Eating a Rainbow: Two Fun Activities for Kids

I go running several mornings a week with three phenomenal ladies. One of them, my friend Cindy, is a super healthy mom who blogs about creative ways that she makes healthy food taste incredible and gets her kids to eat it. I haven't been motivated enough to actually try any of her recipes yet, but I have thoroughly enjoyed having her make several of them for me.

Inspired by all of our morning running conversations about eating healthier... I've tried to set a few goals for our family and find creative ways to include more veggies and fruit in our day.

My 4 year old son is a picky eater, so I got him involved to help me accomplish our goals.

First, we read Lili's Strawberry House by Sahar Bergis. Sahar is a registered dietitian and mom of two adorable girls (ages 3 and 5). Her book is about a little girl name Lili who lives in a strawberry house. Throughout the book readers are taught about vegetables and how they help them. My son loved the book and the darling illustrations and it inspired us to create two simple activities to help us eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables each day.

1. A Rainbow Grocery Store Hunt

This activity is a new weekly tradition for us. It doesn't need much explanation. Each week we head to the grocery store and hunt for fruits and vegetables. The goal is to bring home at least one fruit or veggies (or both) in every color of the rainbow. We have favorites that we must get each week (raspberries and blackberries) and then we try and get a few new (to my kids) ones to try. This requires me to be more creative and actually look for new recipes. So far the kids haven't gotten too crazy with their choices, but my son is definitely more willing to try a fruit or veggie that he picked out than one that I choose!

2. Build a Rainbow

This was another super simple, yet fun and very visual activity. After we went on our rainbow grocery store hunt, I drew pictures of all of the fruits and veggies we bought (while my son listed them off) and then we colored them in and cut them out. Meanwhile my daughter spent her time sampling our purchases.

Next we cut out six circles from rainbow cardstock colored paper and taped them on our kitchen wall (see top of this post). Somehow I originally had pink in our rainbow, but my husband reminded me that it isn't actually one of the real colors, so it didn't make the cut 🙁

I also taped all the fruits and veggies onto the wall (with painters tape). If you want your materials to be more durable, laminate them. I need to do that asap... but I am always so slow to do it!

Once our rainbow and our colorful fruit and veggies were on our wall then we used them to try and keep track of whether or not we were eating a rainbow every day! Each day we took them off and started over with our goal and tried to be better!

Most days we haven't eaten something from every color, but we have definitely increased the amount of fruits and veggies we've been eating... so we'll keep working on it! We keep changing the fruits/veggies each week.

If you're looking for another rainbow eating resource, I love this 5-A-Day the Easy Way printable from The Train to Crazy. It is a simple way to teach kids about serving size and encourages them to eat 5+ servings of colorful fruits and veggies each day.

Do you have any fun ways that you get your kids to eat healthier?

What is your child's favorite fruit or vegetable?

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