Space, the sea, pets, insects … what theme do you love to cover year after year? What gets your creative juices flowing thinking about all the activities you can do?
For me, it’s a food theme. No, it’s not just the cooking component I love. And who wouldn’t like making pizzas, muffins (the healthy kind) or fruit salad with their class? It’s the literacy activities that I really enjoy most, well maybe the cooking too!
Get Kids Writing
1. Have your kids interview a piece of fruit.
Not every child has tasted a fig or seen a star fruit but I’m hoping most, if not all, know about apples, oranges or bananas.
To introduce the lesson I like to make a table on the board with the following headings; fruit, how it grows, taste, how to eat, recipes. Then we start to list the fruit we know. If I know the class will be limited in their knowledge of fruits, I bring in a few for them to try.
Eventually, we come up with a list, even if we have to do a little research along the way. Once they know about fruit they can choose one to ‘interview’.
2. Make a class book.
This activity can stimulate so much discussion on just what is the best sandwich. Provide the kids with a sentence starter and have them finish it. Staple the answers along with the title page and place it in your class library.
3. Make lists of what a healthy lunch would look like.
Have you ever looked at a child’s lunch box and just cringed. It’s a lunch box of sugar and preservatives. Parents are busy, I know, and it’s easy for them to grab something pre-packaged but we can still educate children about healthy eating.
We can also get some great adjectives into their writing – creamy, crispy, crunchy, mushy, juicy, sweet, chewy.
4. Write a procedure or as it’s known in a recipe – the method.
Have your kids write how they would make a sandwich or pizza. Better still make that sandwich or pizza first!
5. Give them a story starter and watch their creativity flow.
Story starters are great for encouraging some great writing from your students.
Why not make the story a procedure?
6. Make wanted and not wanted posters
By now you’ve probably had great discussions on healthy and unhealthy food. ‘Wanted’ and ‘Not Wanted’ posters are a great way to get your kids to continue to think about makes food healthy and unhealthy.
7. Use picture books with a food theme
A quick Google search will reveal a myriad of books with a food theme. Grab a food based reading response sheets to have your class examine characters, plot, main idea, cause and effect, fact and opinion, problem and solution.
8. Discover new vocabulary.
There are so many foods your kids probably have never heard of.
As you start your theme, write a list of all the different foods your children discover. By the end of the theme, you should have an impressive list.
Why not incorporate the senses as well and explore how the food looks, tastes, smells, feels, even sounds? Tasty sausages sizzling, fragrant, prickly pineapples, spicy, tender chicken …
Science Activities
Science activities work perfectly with a food and nutrition theme.
- Kids can learn about food groups.
- Discover where food comes from – not just the shop!
- Look at healthy food.
Other Literacy Activities for your food theme
A whole range of fun activity sheets can be added to your unit – rhyming words, synonyms and antonyms, nouns. Word searches, scrambled sentences and labeling activities are great as a stand-alone activity or for fast finishers.
Literacy Center Games
No theme would be complete without a range of center games. Kids can count syllables in food words, pair food-based rhyming words, make compound words, identify short and long vowels in food words and plural and singular food words.
Grab a pack
There’s just so much you can do with this theme! If you would like a ready-made pack with the above activities and more you can find it in my TpT store. Just click the picture below.
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