There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly….Food Pyramid and Nutrition Activities

 This past week we’ve been learning about the 5 food groups, the food pyramid, healthy choices for exercise, food, and washing our hands so we don’t get germs or sicknesses spreading around the classroom. Here are a few fun activities we did! 

First we read the story There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly….after which we made our own!

I put the story at the listening post this week with the felt lady and animals activity and it has been super popular! Go figure. I used this store purchased felt lady to design our paper reproductions.

I drew this Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly freehand! Woot! The animals are below along with the rhyming text. The kids had fun reading the story text along with dropping the corresponding animal down the lady’s mouth. I had a parent helper cut out the “tummy” and put a piece of  old overhead projector acetate behind it and tape it up. Then the kids colored them and we backed them with colored paper, leaving a little place from her hand down to her hemline open to retrieve the “animals”. They colored animals that went along with the story.

I also typed up the words to go along with all the animals in The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly….

These have been very engaging for the students. They really loved doing this activity to go along with our Healthy Lifestyles unit.

 I am going to have the kids write their own “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a ______” innovations. I have typed up a story frame. We will work on it for a few days and I can’t wait to see what creative things the kids come up with!

Everybody’s Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly looked a little different.

Then we did a fun activity putting different foods in the “Old Lady Who Swallowed Stuff’s” belly. I had each table of kids discuss what should go in the trash and what she should eat to make her healthier. We talked about things that we should eat sparingly like cookies, french fries and candy.

We have read all of these innovations on the original “There Was an Old Lady” books. Some of them were really funny. i

This Activity was really cute for a CENTER GAME. Use a MRS. BUTTERWORTH’S empty syrup bottle to “feed” the old lady words using beads and pipe cleaners.  I saw a cute picture of it on Pinterest. It’s from Housingaforest.com.

Some of my collection of “There Was an _______ Lady who Swallowed _______” books.

Then we watched this Youtube on Healthy foods and we listened to a 5 a Day song tape from DOLE while we worked on coloring and cutting out our Little Old Ladies. HERE  are a bunch of printables for kids on Healthy Eating topics.

We read this reader’s theater on Mr. Energy and how he keeps his body in good shape by eating right. We didn’t have time to do the puppets.

Here is a list of book to read kids to help them understand the good things we can eat to make us healthy and fit. Check them out HERE at Babble.com.

 We read this scholastic news, watched the Magic School Bus video to go along with it. Then we used my two classroom stethoscopes and listened to our own hearts beating after we came back from P.E. on Thursday. Some of the kids listened to their neighbor’s hearts. They were amazed!

Stethoscopes for listening to our healthy hearts and pedometers to count our steps at recess. We talked about how important exercise is and how eating lots of fatty, fried foods can line your arteries with yucky goop called cholesterol that can block your blood’s flow from your heart and cause heart attacks.  Everybody had a relative who had heart issues.  They were very interested in heart health! Amazing!

Well our Government is going from the food pyramid to the “food plate” thinking it will be easier for kids to understand. Maybe it is. Check it out above. A fun online interactive game we will play in computer lab is HERE.

We colored this “food Groups” worksheet and stapled it and the foolish old lady on the back of their Little Old Lady health projects so they could read them to brothers and sisters at home and replay and act out the story.

This was a very funny poem about a lady who overeats on junk food that the kids LOVED! And we also read the riddles and they figured out what food groups were the answers.

A fun center that the kids loved was my felt food pyramid with felt pieces to place in the right places. Then they each made their own pyramid for their desk as a fast finisher this week.

The Food Pyramid Flannel Board activity center……

Good nutrition Worksheet we did this week.

We also used the vocabulary words Nutrition and Healthy this week as part of our 10 vocabulary words. Everybody got 100% on the test too! Woo Hoo!

These were really cute made up on the kids’ desks….I think I got this from 5 a Day at Dole. Check out Dole’s Website HERE. I’ve gotten lots of free activities from them because I asked.

We will keep writing our innovations on the book The Little Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and post them next week when we are all done! I can’t wait to see the finished stories!