This is a guest post by Holly Jachowski, community manager at Education.com which provides thousands of educational activities for kids.
Make a shopping list. Literally! With this fun educational activity, you can help your preschooler make a cute shopping notepad to keep and use or give away as a gift. Using cut-outs from newspaper food ads, you and your child can create a fun, colorful project and explore the food pyramid along the way. This is also great way for your child to practice early math skills of sorting and categorizing!
DIY Grocery Store Notepad
What You Need:
- Colorful grocery store ads
- Safety scissors
- Thin cardboard (something from a box in your recycling bin will work just fine)
- Small magnet (thin ones work best; just cut up some old business card magnets from your fridge)
- School glue or hot glue
- Stapler
- Paper (lined or unlined)
What You Do:
- Grab a pair of scissors and a stack of colorful grocery store ads. The Sunday newspaper ads should provide more than enough material for this easy project.
- Ask your preschooler to help you cut out pictures of food items. Encourage good cutting practice and show your child how to follow the lines around the edges of the pictures.
- As your child works, discuss and sort the pictures. Make a vegetable pile, a fruit pile, a bread pile, and so on. Talk about the food pyramid and which foods our bodies need the most. Is it fruits and vegetables, or cheese and butter?
- Select your paper. Unlined printer paper works well, but so does school-lined notebook paper. Cut about 10-15 pieces of the paper the size you want for your notepad. Keep in mind that the pictures will be glued on and will take up extra space, so make sure the paper is big enough to also include writing.
- Have your child glue some food pictures to each piece of paper. Encourage her to fill in the edges around the paper so there’s plenty of room left in the middle of each sheet of paper. Too difficult? You can have her glue just one or two pictures to the bottom of each sheet.
- After the pages have dried, stack them. Cut-outs may stick out from the edges of the paper, but it just adds to the charm of this child-made project.
- Cut a piece of thin cardboard to match the size of the papers. Stack the papers on the cardboard and staple the pile, using about three evenly placed staples across the top. (You should now have something that looks a little like a legal pad.)
- Use school glue or hot glue to attach a thin magnet strip across the top of the back side of the cardboard, so that the pad will stick to your fridge. You have created a beautiful grocery notepad to use and enjoy! Use it right away, or tuck it away to give for Mother’s Day, Christmas, or another time your child wants to surprise someone with a homemade gift.
What are some fun ways to teach kids about food?
Editor at AllFreeKidsCrafts
AllFreeKidsCrafts.com is pleased to welcome parents and kids of every age to our collection of the most exciting kids' craft ideas from all over the web. For young minds, arts and crafts develop creativity, so AllFreeKidsCrafts is here to inspire their imaginations with activities and crafts for kids of every age. From nature crafts to make in your own back yard, to edible kids crafts in the kitchen, to crafts for kids who dream of adventure, we feature all sorts of kids crafts from the web's most innovative parents and craft designers.
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