What a great visit to the Ontario Early Years program in Tavistock this morning. It was a PD day, which meant we saw a few older children joining in the fun.
I took grocery store flyers, scissors, glue and crayons and placed it out on the table and invited children to make and share their menus with me when they were done. Adelia is school age and took to the task of spreading out one of the flyers on the floor and searched for some of her favourite foods. She would tell me about each item as she cut them out and glued them on her sheet. She really likes apples, and yellow is her favourite. She then cut out pumpkins and when I asked her if she liked to eat pumpkins her reply was “no, no, I don’t eat THE PUMPKINS, but I LOVE the seeds”. I told Adelia that I had made pumpkin loaf on the weekend and had cooked with real pumpkin by first boiling it and then mashing it up like potatoes. (At that point I also learned that she likes mashed potatoes). She was quite interested in how I had made this pumpkin loaf and wanted to know what I put it in. We looked for some of the items in the grocery flyer that I had used, flour, sugar, eggs etc. What a rich and interesting conversation I had with this little girl because of some grocery flyers that usually end up being thrown in the recycling bin. I encourage you to let your children cut out their favourite foods from this weeks food flyers. They can create a menu of their favourites or help with making the next grocery shopping list.
You will see in the other picture that Adelia’s little sister wanted to make a menu as well. She had lots of favourites! This was a great opportunity for her to work on her fine motor skills and she was determined to use the scissors and cut her items out of the flyer on her own.
Oxford Early Literacy 