Looking for ways to boost your child’s food curiosity this summer? Here are some ideas to help you get more plants on their plate.
If you’ve got kids at home more than usual for the next couple of months, this is a great opportunity to expose them to more plant foods.
Summer is the perfect time to focus on building your child’s curiosity about things like fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
This may be especially opportune if your kiddos attend a nut-free daycare or school setting for the rest of the year, but there are no nut allergies in your home.
Here are 3 ways to take advantage of all the fresh plant foods the summer season has to offer, and help encourage your kids’ curiosity (and hopefully, expand their palate!).
1. Plant a garden
There’s still time to get a garden planted if you haven’t already. And, if you don’t feel like planting one outside, you can always do an indoor garden.
What will grow best depends on where you live, but some great produce to grow yourself might include:
- Kale
- Spinach
- Swiss chard
- Berries (may take a few seasons to produce fruit)
- Green and yellow wax beans
- Peas
- Tomatoes
- Carrots
- Onions
- Chives
- Leeks
- Basil
- Lemon balm
Your kids can help pick out the seeds at the store, prep the soil, plant the seeds, participate in the watering, and watch their little plants grow over the weeks. Then, they can help harvest, prep, and enjoy!
Gardens are a wonderful way to help connect your kiddos to nature and where their food comes from. Being involved in this process can help encourage questions and curiosity, increasing the likelihood of trying new things.
2. Create more opportunities for kitchen involvement
As much as it can slow down the process of getting from A to Z, kids benefit from being assigned tasks and responsibilities.
Whether it’s a household chore, a self-care or hygiene task, or a kitchen job, giving your child more roles this summer will help boost their curiosity and independence. Meal prep-related tasks can encourage them to try new things.
Some easy, kid-friendly ideas for snacks this summer – that they can help make and enjoy – include:
- Smoothies: Tossing in combinations of ingredients like pitted dates, greens, frozen fruit, berries, chia seeds, cashews, plant milk, silken tofu, or even green peas helps your child experiment with flavors, textures, and even colors – and then enjoy their final creation (and the nutrition they get from it). Homemade smoothies work well any time of day.
- Popsicles: Homemade popsicles are great because they allow total control over the ingredients, and your child can be in charge of choosing flavor combos, blending them, and even helping pour them into popsicle molds or freezer tubes using a funnel. (Pro tip- pour any leftover smoothies your child doesn’t finish into popsicle molds for later!)
- Salads: Salads are often deconstructed in our house as this helps encourage our kids to actually try them, but this all depends on your individual child’s preferences. There are no hard rules for making a salad, so you can have your child do things like picking greens from the garden, washing carrots, whisking together dressing, rinsing canned beans or lentils, chopping walnuts, or sprinkling hemp seeds.
- Nice cream: Homemade nice cream is a delicious treat for hot days that also provides a good dose of fruit! Use things like frozen bananas or berries, mango or honeydew chunks, blended with plant milk to make a creamy non-dairy ice cream.
3. Regrow veggies
Have you ever tried to regrow veggies in your kitchen? This is a fun science experiment to try that our kids always think is “so cool!”.
Some of the best things to regrow are lettuce and onions. This is a great hands-on experiment as these foods may take a little more encouragement to try for many kids.
To get started, just take the end of a head of lettuce (use the rest for salads!) and place it into a shallow dish of water. Place it somewhere in your kitchen where it has sun exposure, like a windowsill.
Change the water every day and watch as the stump begins to grow new leaves.
It won’t grow into a whole new head of lettuce, but it will be enough for your kids to notice the difference, take pride in their labor of love, and hopefully eat some!
Boost your child’s food curiosity by giving them new opportunities to interact and connect with their food this summer!
Chime in: What other new experiences can you have with your kids around their food this summer? Share them in the comments!
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