Home Edders | Preschool class about Nutrition | Healthy vs Unhealthy

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Healthy nutrition and our daughter

As we all know, nutrition is super important and we can thrive best when we take healthy nutrition to ourselves. I personally have not been doing that well on eating healthy during a huge part of my life, but luckily I can say that we (my boyfriend included) have made a change in that after some health problems came peeking in our lives. For our daughter, I hope we can avoid learning the lessons after the harm has been done but teach her early.

This may be the biggest challenge I'm having regarding educating her, as she's pretty stubborn. She has had a few good months when she was very interested in trying all veggies and other foods that I offered her, last winter this was all undone and we seemed to have gone back to before her interest in those healthy things. She can be quite a challenge when trying to convince her, that I'm now turning things around and aiming at educating her about nutrition so that she can gain interest in food and hopefully finally adapts her response when we offer her something healthy.

I'm not worried about her health (yet), but well aware that something structurally needs to change to turn this around. So I collected a bunch of videos about healthy food and will let her watch them first to see where her interest is at.

Lesson material and set up

I'm collected several videos online about healthy foods, which she can watch on her own.




After this, we start with the worksheets I picked online.

Worksheets used:
https://preschool365.com/healthy-foods/
As you can see, you have a few options to chose from.

After this, we will look into our freezer to find some vegetables we've discussed and see if there's any of them that she now finds interesting to try again. (fingers crossed!)

The actual class

The little lady was a bit annoyed that she had to watch videos about nutrition, my boyfriend was the one instructing her to check them out as he's always up really early with her and said give the links to me, I'll make sure she'll watch them before you are awake. How convenient!

When I woke up about 45 minutes later, she was quite annoyed and mostly saying I don't want to watch this, etc. But, I told her to watch it so we can do a fun class where she could color the worksheets as well, then her mood changed.

Today we made this work altogether, it was a true family effort! <3

I started with the fun part: coloring

I first asked her what she saw in the drawings, luckily she recognized them all, only the sweets were a bit unclear, which is not a problem. After I went through all the things on the sheets, she got to color them to her liking:


Time to color the healthy and unhealthy symbols...


I have to admit, that at this point I didn't even realize that this worksheet could have some arguable healthy/unhealthy things on them, depending on personal diet / experience / view on nutrition. If I speak for our family alone, we have tried different things like Keto/Carnivore and Vegetarian for a diet to discover the foods that were causing health issues, and for all of these diets mentioned, I can name pros and cons. Therefore I find it hard to pick sides for something like bacon, as it depends on your diet.

My boyfriend ate a lot of bacon while on a carnivore diet, and guess what? It was one of the few things that his body accepted without giving him a hard time processing the food. So I may be biased in a way, but in our family, currently, I'm picking the bacon for healthy, while I'm fully aware of the fact that it may not be seen as healthy to most people.

I noticed the arguable healthy/unhealthy drawings by having one short for the healthy one and one extra for the unhealthy one. It's all good though, you can totally fill in this exercise as you please fitting to your family's beliefs!

Time to pick sides (lol)


This is where we agreed on, she did quite well if you ask me!

The next worksheet had the same order, first color the food and drinks to her liking, cutting them out, and placing them in the column of "Eat more of" or "Eat less of".


Again, a little room for discussion is possible. But I'm very proud of how she sat down to work on these sheets.

Practicing eating vegetables

After these fun sheets, I said to her that we were going to check the freezer and see if she finds one of the vegetables interesting. I named them and showed her which ones we have in there, she decided that she wanted to try green beans again. Today I'm preparing them for dinner and she promised she'd try them without a fuzz. Let's see how that goes later! To be sure, I'm adding another sort of veggies so she has a choice. That often helps!

Follow up classes

I'm going to do an art class with her about vegetables and fruit. She can be all creative using paint with the topic: healthy nutrition.

Field trip plans: fruit picking farms (I checked the season-opening dates but all expected from June and later). I've set reminders in my calendar so we won't miss this fun part of education!

In case you have cool tips for nutrition field trips (5-year-old) please leave a comment!

I hope you liked this class, and if you have any cool tips for future nutrition classes and/or resources to check out, please let me know in a comment!

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18 comments
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Teaching our children to have a balanced diet from a very young age is fundamental, as it is the basis for their good health as adults.

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You are doing well in teaching your daughter about healthy living. Just like the Bible said, "Train up a child on the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it".

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I didn't even realize that this worksheet could have some arguable healthy/unhealthy things on them, depending on personal diet / experience / view on nutrition.

I was looking at the sheets and thinking the same thing. As we learn more about health and our individual bodies we realise the is no cut and dry way to determine healthy for everyone. The cheese is another good example as so many people are intolerant to dairy. I recently watched this video, which talks about someone who cured his ailments with a carnivore diet and notes how the bread based diet of the Egyptians likely made them fat.

Yet, there is also a rare disorder where you can't digest fats and have to eat high carb instead. Imagine the ticks going the opposite way around!

I really like this balanced article.

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As we learn more about health and our individual bodies we realise the is no cut and dry way to determine healthy for everyone.

Exactly, I even think that (seeing the diet changes to see where the problem lies) for some people you may need a healthy combination of a few. When the docs can't find anything, you're on your own finding this problem, which imo is probably better as we now lean towards natural remedies / changes in diet instead of meds.

I recently watched this video, which talks about someone who cured his ailments with a carnivore diet and notes how the bread based diet of the Egyptians likely made them fat.

I watched the video, and also let my boyfriend watch it as I didn't know if he already knew all of this, which was the case. But thank you so much for sharing it, as I haven't seen as much of these videos as he did and now I learned something myself!
Interesting stuff, and I also find it "notable" that it's beyond my belief that some people don't question dietary advise that changes every few years when you see a graphic like in this video marking the period in time where people started to get fatter. Aka cereal advise ;) Of course, I still have a ton to learn, but when I bump onto this kind of info it makes me even more eager to find the best diet for ourselves rather than following "Main stream media" advise.

Especially when you think about the fact that nobody is even mentioning taking your vitamins, eat healthy, exercise, get fresh air anymore, while the world is getting more and more depressed by restrictions. But that's a totally different topic I guess :)

Thanks for your comment and support!

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It was a really well balanced post and a great read.

!ENGAGE 50

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Thank you!

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By the way, so you know you can tag #naturalmedicine on your HomeEdders posts, to earn LOTUS too? This one particularly is appropriate.

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Ouch, no, I thought it may be not done, so I didn't.. It crossed my mind, though. Thanks for pointing that out :)

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Thank you for your engagement on this post, you have recieved ENGAGE tokens.

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I've featured your post in the @HomeEdders weekly curation and selected you as this weeks beneficiary recipient.

Curated by @minismallholding on behalf of @HomeEdders.


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Thank you for the feature and overall support! <3

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Explaining different nutritional requirements is a fun one, I remember having to explain it to my kids when they were 4-8, as while we see eggs as "healthy", they were seen as "unhealthy" for one of the friends they at at the time as said friend was anaphylactically allergic to eggs. I don't think it took as long as it could have to grok as we knew quite a few families with differing dietary requirements (gluten free, vegan, various food intolerances etc). Meanwhile we were lucky not to have a lot of food intolerances (only one was food colouring with youngest) so had just stuck with stereotypical "healthy" and "unhealthy" XD

I like that you brought up that questionability here.

That's some nice colouring in :D

With kids they're going to go on and off foods as they age and it's going to drive you nuts for a bit where a previous favourite thing ever is suddenly yuck. Just gotta keep offering whatever is healthy for your current diet/stage and hoping XD

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Thanks you for your comment!
Yes, I figured more people would discover the questionability while educating about nutrition. Especially in a world where you hear more and more about food intolerance...

Our daughter has already seen how her father reacts very very bad to certain things (the stomach issues cause extreme visits to the toilet to say it in a most delicate matter lol) and she of course, remembers seeing and hearing that. So she has seen him change diets several times, but we're still not sure as cures never seem lasting.

I think in his case, the best choice so far was keep taking high doses of vitamin c and d every day.

Look at the intake of our daughter, some days I'm just happy that she at least eats a bit better than before, and just leave the struggle out because I also know things go in phases and some things will pass.

Thanks for your great comment! <3

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Oof that sounds uncomfortable x_x it could be several things triggering it, good luck finding them D:

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lol, it is ;) but luckily, more and more "tests" that we do, reveal that we can make it a lot better (even temporarily) so eventually, the solution will be found, I'm sure :)

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