Food and Nutrition Activities and Centers for Little Learners

It’s all about a Food and Nutrition theme!  I just LOVE this theme because the learning opportunities are ENDLESS.   An added bonus is a large amount of environmental print my little learners are seeing when I use food containers!

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Food and Nutrition Activities and Centers for Fine Motor

Pineapple Cutting Craftivity Light Table! Use tissue paper to make a cutting craftivity more light table friendly. Students cut the strips into squares and glue them to the template that is printed on regular copy paper. Putting a craft on the light table is a fun idea to make it more exciting for young children. 

Chef Light Table! Practice pre-writing skills and fine motor strength on the light table! Students can build lines with different-shaped noodles for a chef or restaurant in the community. They could also trace the lines with dry-erase markers. I made the lines by writing on the inside of a lamination sheet and running through the laminator to seal.

Food and Nutrition Activities and Centers for Literacy

The I Like to Eat class book is a ton of fun to make and great scissor skill work, too.  Gather some grocery store ads or collect wrappers from students’ lunches (chip bags, applesauce lids, yogurt tops, etc.), which are both filled with environmental print!  Print the freebie, cut it out, and glue it to small paper lunch bags.  Students cut out food from the ads and glue it to the bag to create their “page” in the book!  Laminate, bind the book with a metal ring, and put it in your classroom library for students to read over and over all year long!

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Food Themed Bookshelf

My all-time favorite grocery store and food book is Put It On The List!  It’s a super cute book about what happens when you don’t make a list before you go shopping.  As a follow-up activity, each student makes his or her own shopping list.  Check out a detailed list of my favorite Food and Nutrition books HERE.

Shopping for Letters and Sight Words

It is so important to make learning letters FUN and hands-on.   This game does just that!  Students pick a letter, put the matching magnet letter in their cart, and write it at the bottom.

If you teach kinders or have super smart pre-k friends, then make the game harder using sight words.  I LOVE these dry-erase pockets to put the game boards in.

Grocery Store Letter Dot It

If your students need more practice identifying letters, then this game is perfect.  Students can practice matching uppercase, lowercase, or uppercase with lowercase.  We used cereal to cover our game boards just to make it a bit more fun!

Food Themed Writing Center

Put food-themed vocabulary cards and writing paper in the writing center. You can also add some blank shopping lists and grocery store ads too!  Students can use the word cards or cut out pictures from the ads to create their own shopping lists.  Your students will be excited to make shopping lists for their families!

Three Bears Retelling

Reading, rereading, and retelling books is SO IMPORTANT!  It builds fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, sense of story, and so much more.  I added magnets to the back of these story cards so students can retell the story on the magnet board in the library center.

Food and Nutrition Activities for Blocks

Grocery Store STEM using Positional Words

Don’t forget about the blocks center!  Add empty cereal boxes, food cups, cans, community vehicles, and these positional word STEM challenge cards.  Challenge your students to plan and build various structures.  It’s a FUN way to practice those tricky positional words too.
If you don’t have a collection of empty cereal boxes, then ask your students to bring them from home!  That’s where mine came from.  At the end of your theme, fold up the boxes and keep them for next year (that’s what I do).  Using empty food containers also adds environmental print to the center, so students are reading words and letters as they play!

Check out this garage he built using items from our pretend grocery store!  He snuck over to the grocery store during centers and grabbed a few smaller boxes.

Food and Nutrition Activities for Math

Environmental Print Math

More empty food containers means environmental print to the center!  Students are constantly reading words and letters as they play.

Cut off the front of a box, then cut it up into pieces to create a puzzle!  Cut it up like a regular puzzle or in strips, and write a number on the bottom of each piece (in order).  Super simple!  If this is tricky for your students, put a photo of the complete puzzle in the bag or put the back of the box in the bag for students to use as a guide.

Measure containers with snap cubes!  Students can count how tall a container is, compare the sizes and estimate how tall it is before they measure.

Veggie Shapes Clip Cards

Students identify the shape and clip the matching shape card.  Plus, when you use clothespins, students are strengthening their fine motor skills too!

Cup Numbers! Use little plastic cups and place a dot sticker inside with a number on it. Then students can use tweezers to pick up and count that many pom poms into each cup. Students could also use little scoops or just their fingers to get the pom poms. 

Food 3D Shape Sort! Make a graph and have your students sort 3D shapes. I did this during a food unit, so students sorted food items and boxes into the correct area on the graph. Ask parents to send in empty food containers so that you get a variety of food packages. This is great for a food, nutrition, or Thanksgiving theme.

Food Themed Play Dough Tray

We LOVE play dough trays in my classroom, so we make one for each and every theme.  For this one, I grabbed some veggie counters, colored play dough, tiny clear bowls, small pie pans, and plastic play food utensils from the dollar store.  Students can hide the veggies in the dough, make “food” in the pans and bowls, or use the utensils to cut, smash and scoop the dough.  TONS of fine motor happening in this activity.

Fruit Printing

Fruits and veggies are so important for our little learners to eat, but you can also make beautiful art with them.  For this activity, students printed with apples, oranges, bananas, blueberries, and blackberries!  We also make veggie prints a few days later.

The Sensory Table

Put dried beans and peas in the sensory table with measuring scoops, tweezers, and paper towel tubes.  Just make sure you DO NOT use dried red kidney beans…they are poisonous if ingested!

Food Centers for Science and Blocks

My Body & Teeth Science! Learn about the body and teeth while doing a food study. It makes perfect sense you use food to power your body and teeth to chew up all the yummy goodness.

Health or Nutrition Blocks & STEM Props! Use the community helpers STEM I Can Build cards since there are more options for a health and nutrition theme, but the fall STEM I Can Build cards will work too. 

Grocery Store – Dramatic Play

Change the dramatic play center into a Grocery Store!  It’s a ton of fun, and it’s super easy to embed math and literacy opportunities into their play.  Check out how I did it Grocery Store Dramatic Play HERE.

Food Printables!

Get all my Food and Nutrition printables in my Food Math and Literacy Centers pack in my TPT store HERE.  I did most of the work for you, so all you will need to do is prep and print.  Now, you can have more time with your students, families, and, most importantly, for yourself!

Check out these food and nutrition activities in this video.

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