Often when I browse women's magazines that have fun foods for kids, I find myself charmed with the clever and artistic little food creations but totally lacking in follow-through for making them myself. Most of the time they are just TOO MUCH HASSLE relative to the kids' enjoyment. Here are eleven fun lunch ideas that have a very favorable "preparation to fun ratio."
1.
Have a taste test lunch. Buy several different kinds of apples (for example); cut them into slices and let everyone sample. Talk about the similarities and differences and which ones were the favorites and least favorites.
2.
Pack bagged lunches, write a name on each lunch and
hide them around the back yard. Let the kids hunt for their lunches and have a picnic with them afterward.
3.
Eat under the table.
4.
Freeze juice in novelty ice cube trays. Put one or two fun shaped ice cubes into each child's glass of water.
5.
Play blindfolded fruit salad. Make a fruit salad with lots of different kinds of fruit for dessert. Let each child take turns being blindfolded. Allow the other children feed a piece of fruit to the blinded child who gets to guess what he or she just ate!
6.
Use crazy serving dishes. Hunt around the playroom for toys that could serve as dishes or cups. For example, use a frisbee for a plate; serve veggie straws from the holes in a duplo block; drink from your toddler's stacking cups, etc.
7.
Have an animal food luncheon.8. For older children, have a
foreign language restaurant lunch. Using a foreign language dictionary, look up the names of all of the foods, drinks, serving utensils- EVERYTHING you are planning to use for lunch. Write those words on a menu, and let the kids consult together and order three things at a time. For each course, only bring out the three items they order, and at the end of each course take those things away. Now they might end up ordering soup, a knife, and a some ketchup for the first course, but wouldn't that be fun? They would have so many giggles trying to figure out how to eat the soup and what to do with the ketchup!
9.
Play the sliced banana trick on your kids.
10.
Cut their sandwiches or apples into little puzzles, and let them put them together before they eat.
11.
Make glow in the dark juice drinks. (All it requires is some tonic water and a black light!)
12. Let the kids
use cookie cutters to cut shapes out of
sliced cheese, watermelon, or finger jello, etc.
1. Fill a 8x13 pan with rice. Cover the rice with grass, leaves, flowers, stones, moss, whatever you have on hand. (M and G really enjoyed gathering materials in the back yard and then arranging the little garden themselves)
Here's a step-by-step tutorial for making a fall maple leaf crown from Twig and Toadstool.
The pumpkin disguise for a toilet paper roll over at Sippy Cup Central is very cute (and simple!)
Pepper Paints has a very fun recipe for play doh that smells like homemade pumpkin pie! (inedible- might be frustrating to some, but it sound like fun to me)
I took M and G on a walk around our block the other day with some of their friends, and to make it more fun, we decided to take a bucket along and collect pieces of nature that looked like different letters of the alphabet.
Often when I browse women's magazines that have fun foods for kids, I find myself charmed with the clever and artistic little food creations but totally lacking in follow-through for making them myself. Most of the time they are just TOO MUCH HASSLE relative to the kids' enjoyment. Here are eleven fun lunch ideas that have a very favorable "preparation to fun ratio."
I finally figured out what to do with all of the acorns M and G have been collecting on our walks- I made an acorn crown for our dress-up chest!
a piece of paper and then just glue gun-ed acorns side by side using the circle on the paper as a guide. I did two layers and then added a few points to the crown.
Building Character from the Start: 201 Activities to foster creativity, literacy, and play in K-3 by Susan Ragsdale and Ann Saylor is full of ideas for sparking meaningful conversations between children and adults. It seeks to engage children holistically, by letting them create, read, and play.
If your family has one or more toddlers, chances are that Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you See? gets a bit of mileage at your house. The book Building Character from the Start: 201 Activities to foster creativity, literacy and play in K-3 has a great idea for making a homemade companion book. (By the way, I'll be giving away a copy of Building Character from the Start later this week; so stay tuned!)
The idea for this little luncheon came from watching M's delight in eating her dinnertime salads ever since I started referring to lettuce as "bunny food." I began to wonder if there is anything that a preschooler won't eat if they think they are acting the part of an animal.
For a little extra fun, I made little animal food labels for each food, printed them out on cardstock and taped them to popsicle sticks. If you would like to use them for an animal food luncheon of your own, feel free to borrow the template from below.
Artists which sells personalized gifts and party favors is especially fun for me to feature here because when I was in college I worked for a similar company making hand-painted items.
ber party; don't you?
The girls had fun today playing in the tents we made by throwing dirty sheets over the furniture. Their enjoyment might motivate me to be wash the bedding more often. (but probably not!)
Do you ever accidentally let the bread dough rise a little too much so that it is no longer good for bread? Don't throw it away before you give it to the kids to enjoy! Bread dough can be lots of fun- as you can see from this picture of my brother when he was a young teenager.
Homemade salt dough is a great alternative to the expensive craft store bakeable doughs like Sculpey or Fimo. The recipe is quick, and you likely already have everything you need to get started!
The other day, M and I used salt dough to make a birthday gift for one of her friends. I got a little impatient with the process and tried to paint it too soon (you might be able to see a few cracks), and I wasn't very careful about making sure that the glue gun glue didn't show through, but all in all it was a fun process and M had a gift to give that she was proud of. 
(We used alphabet cookie cutters for the letters, and poked holes in the letters before they were baked so that we could string ribbon through them. The letters are glue- gunned onto a piece of wood to hold them together)
