Making a Healthy Rainbow Pizza Together

My daughter loves helping out in the kitchen. We love making new, fun AND HEALTHY things together. This time we decided to try a rainbow pizza. I'd seen a few recipes, but ultimately created our own (and no we don't have a blue, indigo, violet on this pizza rainbow).

I think it's so important to allow kids the opportunities to work with you in the kitchen. They can learn so many skills they will need their whole lives like measuring, mixing, preparing, etc. For the rainbow pizza my daughter was actually able to be a lot of help. She sprinkled the flour on the pan, spread the pizza sauce on the crust, sprinkled the cheese, and added on the toppings.

This is what it turned out like once it was finished!

Healthy Rainbow Pizza with Kids:

Ingredients:
- Flat bread pizza crusts (we get the frozen kind from Trader Joe's) you could make your own, or even use another type of pizza crust I suppose. Flat bread is delicious though.
- Pizza sauce (make your own, or use one with minimal processing and ingredients, the more veggies in it the better!)
- Shredded cheese. (we're dairy free and we used a soy cheese mixture)
- Broccoli florets, chopped
- Yellow pepper, chopped
- Orange pepper, chopped
- Grape tomatoes, cut in half

For the temperature to bake it at and cooking instructions such as those you should refer to the instructions for your pizza dough.

Of course for the toppings you spread on the sauce, sprinkle on the cheese, then put the toppings on in a rainbow order. Don't forget to let your kiddo be involved as much as possible!

Healthy Dinner

Need some new ideas for healthy toddler or kid meals? I will be posting some!

This is a favorite meal for my kiddo. Both her and I feel good about her eating it and think it's very tasty!

This meal has a grain, protein, and fruits that have various health benefits.

- Cooked cous cous
- Fried tofu
- Sliced strawberries and kiwis fruit salad (with wheat germ, that I forgot to put on before taking the picture).

All of this is pretty simple to make. To fry the tofu I just cut extra firm tofu into strips or dices and then coat them in grapeseed oil before putting them in the pan. Then I just cook them until they are a bit firmer on both sides.

I bet your little one will gobble it all up!

Potato Masher Prints

We love to paint! Painting with fingers, and painting with paintbrushes is fun and great..but it's also wonderful to think outside of that and paint with new and exciting things! Painting never gets boring, but some kids will appreciate the changing it up factor of giving them new things to paint with. Little changes just totally bring familiar activities to a new life!

For this super fun painting session we used potato mashers to create our prints.

Doesn't this look fun? You can get a potato masher from Dollar Tree for just a dollar.

We talked about how our prints we were making were abstract suns for summer time. You can use any color and make anything you want! Get creative!

Simple Oat Sensory Bin

In case you're wondering, the water mark underneath the title for the picture above is the name of my old blog. It's 100% my photo and my sensory bin. :)

Anyway, I just shared a fairly simple sensory bin that's great for measuring, scooping, and pouring/transferring just like this one is. Check it out here. All you have to do to make it is put some dry oats into a sensory bin and provide a measuring cup or spoon and another container along with it. Your toddler will dig in just like mine did!

Enjoy!

Wheat Germ Sensory Bin

So if you follow my blog, you know that my daughter likes to eat wheat germ.. but what you may not know is that it is also fun to play with! Introducing our Wheat Germ Sensory Bin!

All you need for it is a container of wheat germ put into a sensory bin really. But that would get a little boring after a while, after getting to just feel the initial new textures. Kids  love transferring so I provided a measuring spoon and another container for Charlie to transfer the wheat germ into. This went on for a while, transferring back and forth and so on.

This is good for strengthening practical life skills like measuring, scooping, pouring, etc. As well as the many benefits of sensory play that the wheat germ itself is providing.

And when is it not fun to put a baby in your sensory bin?!

Frog Word Wall

This Frog Word Wall is great to put up on your bulletin board during a pond animals/habitat theme. And it's super cute!

The Dollar Tree has such cute cut outs of things and I picked up these frog ones before we made this. Then I used a few different colors of index cards, a Sharpie, and scissors to make the words. The words were

• Toad
• Frog
• Hop
• Ribbit
• Pond
• Amphibian
• Lilly Pad
• Tadpole
• Long tongue
• Fly
• Croak
• Green

You can read these words with your child and discuss them and how they apply to frogs. You can talk about how toads and frogs are "cousins" and how they are both amphibians. Then you can talk about the things they do like hop, ribbit, and croak. You can both practice your ribbits and croaks, and even your hopping like a frog. My daughter loves doing this frog yoga pose. 

The habitat words are important because you're probably focusing on a pond theme. You can discuss how there are lilly pads in the pond that the frogs go on and how they catch flies with their long tongues.

Learning Bones With Dolls

I think that using a baby doll is a really easy way to make learning the parts of the body fun. We did this last fall when we were doing a unit study on bones. My daughter got a kick out of it and definitely retained the information. It's a little hard to show all the bones on a doll (such as the clavicle) but some bones can certainly be taught with one.

We used our Cinderella baby doll. Other than a baby doll, you'll need some Post-it Notes, scissors, and a Sharpie. We decided to focus on some bones in the leg. I took a few Post-it Notes and wrote down the names of the bones on the top (where the sticky part is,) cut them down to size, and then stuck them on the doll with my daughter.

As you can see we did the femur, patella, and tibia on the front side. This is a great way to learn the names of the bones in a fun way, like I said. But it is also great for kids in the emergent reader or even reading phase. This activity helps improve vocabulary and early literacy skills because it has the words written out to be read and seen.