Today I saw a wonderful photo with the caption Nature Has The Best Crayons. Nature also has the best colors especially in a fruit snack of colors.
Some sort of cooking activity with kids is often what happens at our house on the weekends. There’s more time available so that the kids can ‘help’ in the kitchen. Sometimes during the week, it’s too rushed for many families and everyone is too hungry. When possible, including kids in food preparation has lots of benefits.
Thankfully, there are still lots of summer fruits available, so we started by washing some berries and slicing some bananas. There were a couple of peaches left and an orange for the juice. We added some purple (red) grapes and green apple. Nature paints fruit in such a variety of colors. A raspberry and a strawberry are both red, but they are a little different. A banana and a peach are both yellow, but they aren’t the same either. Making a fruit salad was an ideal time for noticing some of nature’s colors.
Nature also paints other foods in wonderful colors. Although peppers are fruits they are not sweet. It’s confusing, but the part of a plant that contains seeds is the fruit. At this time of year, besides the red, yellow, orange, and green peppers, there are also purple peppers. With many local farmers’ markets, there are even more colors. The corn and squash seem to have captured the yellow of the sun. Soon there will be bright orange pumpkins at the markets contrasting with the deep greens.
Colors are one way to stimulate the senses and children are definitely very sensory. In the fall, nature’s colors seem so bright and vibrant. For a play-of-the-day, can you and your child spend some time with the colors of nature?