At the Grocery Store—Encourage Responsibility
Keeping kids involved with the purchasing decisions may be the first step toward making your trip to the store more efficient and less stressful. Since many children love important-sounding titles, you might appoint your child as the Official Assistant Shopper to add to the importance of the role. You may even wish to make a badge out of construction paper that can be attached with a safety pin. Your child could write his or her name or color the badge while you finish last-minute preparations.
Choices
A responsibility you might assign to your assistant shopper could include choosing produce. You may need to explain that mushy apples and green potatoes don't taste good, but after a brief introduction, even young children can look for bad spots and choose the best-looking produce available. Another task that is tailored to this meal plan and adds fun is allowing your child to decide which flavor of gelatin to choose. If you're traveling with more than one assistant shopper, your other helper(s) could pick gelatin for later in the week, or one child could be responsible for picking the gelatin and the other could choose the fresh fruit to serve with it.
Money and Math Skills
Children might also learn about comparison-shopping to find the best value for their money—and maybe even start to become accustomed to working with money, so that they will begin to understand the value of a dollar. Have your children assist in adding the amounts of ingredients needed, so learning to add becomes another valuable lesson. In other recipes that use fractional amounts of the same ingredient, you could even use the amounts to teach older kids about adding fractions.
Healthy Food Choices
Throughout the store, another practical opportunity that presents itself—and one kids of all ages hear about in school—is making healthy food choices. The produce department is a natural place to begin to talk about healthy food choices and how fruits and veggies are generally excellent choices. You might also teach that fish can provide protein, and cheese can supply calcium. This shows your children why the selections in this meal are good choices. In addition, since you are probably making purchases for more than one meal, the snack and cereal aisles are also perfect opportunities for kids to make good food choices.
One of the best things about this type of learning is that it's something kids never outgrow.