Muffin Tin Monday: Eat a Rainbow – and a Game
12 Apr
We love the phrase “Eat a Rainbow” and say it to ourselves as we’re grocery shopping to encourage ourselves to try new fruits and vegetables to fill out that color palate. You can read here about the different vitamins, antioxidants, and the other good phyto-chemicals found in the different colored fruits and veggies.
This week the theme for Muffin Tin Monday was Rainbow, so we had a fruit rainbow for brunch: red strawberries, orange oranges, yellow lemons, green kiwi, blue berries, and purple grapes. KarateKid went with me this weekend to do the shopping and choose the fruit, and he put the tin together this week all by himself while GoGoGirl and I played in the living room! What a treat!
Both kids are fruit-lovers and gobbled this tin up, asking for seconds and thirds!
I also found this fun little Eat a Rainbow game to print out from the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose, and we played it while we were eating. I like this quick game because they’ve included clip art of fruits and vegetables of various colors on the cards. In this game, you draw a hand of cards which are both color-coded by the color of the food and also numbered. Each round, the players flip over one card from their hands. Whichever player flipped over the card with the highest number gets to choose one of the revealed cards to put on her plate. The first player to fill her plate wins!
Instead of printing out the included “plates”, though, I made colored spaces on real paper plates to make the game more appealing to three-year-old GoGoGirl. I also made a double set of the cards so that we could play with our whole family. (Using the double set, if there is a tie, each person who played the highest value card gets to keep that card on her plate.)
We are keeping the plates and cards in a gallon-size bag, and already the kids have started to add their own “house rules” to the game! KarateKid likes to add up the total on all your cards at the end and have the highest total plate be the winner. Because GoGoGirl can’t yet compare two cards and understand that 19 is more than 13, we made a color die to go with the game. In the toddler-rules version, we separate the food cards into piles by color and on our turn, roll the die to see what color card we can pick. The 6th side of the die is a wild star, and you can take whatever card you like.
We’ve had fun playing this game and talking about all the nutritious, different-colored foods! I hope this free game will become a favorite in your house too.
For more Rainbow-licious Muffin Tin Meals, head over to Muffin Tin Mom.
i love how you labeled each color food.
I love the game and your signs. I did a fruit tin too.
I love how you wrote the names of the foods on toothpicks. Wonderful idea!
This is such a great idea. Emily would love all the rainbow colored fruits :0)
That seems like a neat game! And I really like the color signs.
Love the colorful tin! Great game idea, too.