February 16, 2015

Cooking with Kids : Frozen Grapes Caterpillars

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Frozen grapes caterpillar healthy snack for kids.

Little Sister helped with this cooking with kids snack. I pulled out a few toothpicks and green grapes. We threaded three grapes onto each toothpick. Little Sister really had fun with this activity…and what a great fine motor activity it is to thread grapes.

We popped the grapes into the freezer for a few hours until we were ready for a healthy snack. I used
black gel icing to make quick eyes on the caterpillars and snack time was ready.

To go along with our green snack, we made a Green Collage Art project. Go on a color scavenger hunt around your house to gather green strings, ribbons, and scraps. Happy playing and crafting with green!

Encourage healthy eating in your kids by eating through the colors of the rainbow. Let us know if you make these caterpillars! We would love to see pictures and hear about it!

This post is part of an Eating through the Rainbow series with a few other kid activity bloggers. Check out the links below for more snack ideas to eat through the rainbow! Each blogger chose a color and came up with a healthy snack and a craft or activity to go along with that color. How fun! Get ready to play and eat your way through the rainbow!

We made these dyed lollipop sticks last month and have been playing with them a lot. Counting, patterns, fine motor play, art, visual perceptual work, and imagination are fun with these colorful rainbow sticks. They are so easy to dye with just a little food coloring, and very fun. We’ve used these rainbow sticks in a few different ways recently and will be sharing soon on the blog!

Rainbow lollipop sticks dyed with coloring for play, counting, busy bags, math with kids

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Dyed Lollipop Sticks for play and learning

How gorgeous are rainbow lollipop sticks? Don’t you want to play with them?

Here’s How to dye lollipop sticks for play and learning:

We had a ton of extra lollipop sticks left over from various parties. The idea to color them in rainbow shades came to me after seeing them in the baking bin next to food coloring. A rainbow of manipulatives would be fun for all kinds of play. I put a handful of sticks into small plastic baggies and added a few drops of liquid food coloring. More food coloring will bring out brighter colors.

Shake the baggies around to coat the sticks.

Spread the lollipop sticks out on wax paper and allow them to dry.

Use rainbow lollipop sticks for play, math, patterns and colorful learning with kids!

Once dry, you are ready to play! These things are completely gorgeous and we had fun just naming all of the colors, rolling them back and forth, and sorting.

Dye lollipop sticks with food coloring for colorful play!

Practice fine motor skills with kids using DIY dyed lollipop sticks

Fine Motor Skills with Dyed Rainbow Lollipop Sticks

We pulled a plastic bottle from the recycle bin and practiced fine motor skills by dropping the rainbow sticks into the plastic bottle one by one. Drop by colors and work on color identification. Practice beginner math skills by counting one-to-one correspondence as the child names the number of each color. Practice a tripod grasp on the lollipop sticks and pre-handwriting skills.