The Very Healthy Caterpillar

The past couple weeks we've been learning about nutrition and the basic food groups. I was looking for some activity ideas and came across this in one of my files. It was a craft to make a food group caterpillar based on the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Earlier we had discussed some basic food groups like breads/starch, fruits, vegetables, dairy, and protein/meat. We reviewed foods that are included in each group and then read The Very Hungry Caterpillar, discussing which group each food the caterpillar ate went into and if it was healthy or not. Then I told the kids they were going to make a Very HEALTHY Caterpillar!

I had cut out 3 inch circles in 7 colors and cut out that many circles for the minimum number of servings you need of it each day: 1 Purple (for the head), 6 tan (bread and grains), 3 green (vegetables), 2 red (fruit), 2 white (dairy), 2 brown (protein) and 1 pink (oil/fats/sweets). The kids used grocery ads and newspaper inserts to cut out examples for each food group and glued them on the circles (they drew a face on the head circle). Some of their choices were not as "healthy" as they could be, especially the bread group, but we had to work with what was in the papers! LOL! They loved looking through the papers to find the right food, and got great cutting and pasting practice too!
After they finished, I helped them glue the circles on a big piece of white paper. I thought the finished products turned out cute! We are going to use them to review the food groups throughout the year!