Fill their Tummies and Minds with Fruit Animals!

style=”text-align: left;”>Do you need a simple activity that will not only be fun and creative but also fill your child’s tummies with healthy food?

Well, letting your child create their own animal, using healthy bits and pieces from within your fridge worked a treat for us!

Why let them get creative with their food?

• It’s a tactile, fun experience
• It gives them some control over their creations
• They’re more likely to try something they haven’t eaten before
• Your child is more likely to eat their fruit and veggies

After a week of unhealthy eating (we still have so much chocolate in the house left over from Easter), I brought out all the healthy foods for afternoon tea and let my daughters go for it.

They didn’t use all the food I put out but the point was that they chose which healthy ingredients they wanted to eat and use them to create their own animal.

What we used to make fruit animals:

• healthy food (you can use whatever you have in the pantry and fridge). We mainly used fruit.
• skewers and toothpicks (with parental supervision)
•  cake decorating gel
• creativity

This activity was great for developing the girls fine motor skills and also encouraged critical thinking. Working out how to make an animal out of fruit can be quite challenging!

 Use Fruit Animals to learn

• Print out a picture of the animal to help them create it using food. Discuss the parts of the animal and what food you could use to replicate it.
• Make an insect and use three big bits of fruit to create a head, an abdomen and a thorax (you’ll probably need fruit for legs too!)
• Talk about bones and how the skewers work in a similar way, to allow our body to be strong and stand up.

My eldest daughter made a giraffe using blueberries for feet, an orange for the main body, carrots for the neck and a strawberry and grapes for the head.

She’s never really liked oranges, so I was quite shocked at her choice but after she’d made the giraffe and started eating it, she devoured it so fast I didn’t even get to cut myself a slice!

She filled her tummy with all her daily fruit requirements in one sitting.

I felt the twins were a little too young to make their own fruit animals, so we did it together.

I helped them thread the grapes and blueberries onto the skewers and we ended up creating lizards, which they loved! These caterpillar kebabs gave me the inspiration for the lizards below.

All three girls have already asked me if we can make more tomorrow and I’ve said yes.

How can I say no to getting more good food into their tummies and learning about animals at the same time?!

Have you made food fun for your kids lately?