FUN HEALTHY SNACKS FOR KIDS --veggie face sandwiches, fruit pops

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Need a great group activity for the little ones? Make fun healthy snacks for kids! Veggie faces and fruit pops.

healthy snacks for kids

Play with your food! You can decorate more than cookies and cupcakes. You can easily make healthy snacks for kids a fun activity! Here, we make silly veggie faces with tortillas and cut-up vegetables, and we use mini cookie cutters to make fruit pops from watermelon, honeydew, and cantaloupe.

classroom fun for kids

Once the word leaked out at my daughter’s school that I decorate cookies and cupcakes and marshmallows and such things, it wasn’t long before I was tapped as a resource. My daughter’s teacher asked me if I’d like to lead a session with some kids in the school. Of course!

My task was to come up with a 50-minute activity for a bunch of three, four and five year olds. The catch: The school is a no sweets zone. And I’m all about sweets.

And they just completed a whole lot of lessons in fruits and veggies and gardens and healthy eating. Sigh. So… no cookies, no cupcakes, no marshmallows?

Enter fruit and veggies!

tips for hosting a fun food activity

I briefly (very briefly, it would be torture to make kids so young wait to play with food) introduced the concept of food as art, then we yakked about shapes.

What shapes are on our faces, the shapes of the vegetables, and what might be used for what.

The results? While the kids were way quicker with their creations than I anticipated (be prepared with back-up activities), I was crazy impressed by their veggie face skills.

Even the youngest of the group made clever faces, adding features I didn’t even consider, like eyebrows and mustaches. Of course! Eyebrows and mustaches. How could I forget those?

And I needlessly worried that the cookie cutters and fruit would take dexterity and strength they lacked. They wielded those cutters, melons and lollipop sticks like old pros.

how to make silly veggie faces

ingredients you will need

mini tortillas
mix of veggies (cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, bell peppers, celery sticks, alfalfa sprouts, broccoli and/or cauliflower florets)
shredded cheese
sliced cheese
paper plates

what to do

Give each child a paper plate and a mini tortilla. TIP: Tortillas are more sturdy than bread so a better choice.

Have veggies prepared in advance. Slice cucumbers in circles or semicircles, halve cherry tomatoes, slice baby carrots to make small circles. Cut sticks from celery, cucumber, and carrots. Bell pepper slices are great for smiles.

Shredded cheese and alfalfa sprouts are great for hair. Cut Provolone and American cheese slices with circle cookie cutters or scissors to make triangles.

Let kids go nuts designing their faces!

back-up activity: Paper plate veggie scenes

As I mentioned above, kids move more quickly through these activities that you think. A great back-up activity? Veggie scenes!

Draw designs on paper plates and let kids fill them in with vegetables. Broccoli works great for trees! Cauliflower for the clouds, sticks of cucumber and celery for the tree trunk, smaller sticks of cucumber and celery for flower stems, and carrots and tomatoes for flowers