Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs - Food Pyramid Mobile Craft

We read Judi Barrett's Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, in preparation for watching the movie version on DVD, tonight, and did a quick activity, inspired by a Sunday Science post at Just Playin' Around, to tie the story into our current studies.

I printed out a children's version of the food pyramid from the USDA, and we read through it. I also printed out a food pyramid worksheet from Ellen McHenry's Basement Workshop. It pictured the old style food pyramid, but it had a lot of good pictures of food, that we colored and cut out (we actually used two copies of the worksheet, so we could glue the same pictures together, for hanging on our mobile).

Finally, I printed out a couple of sheets with food group labels printed on colors corresponding to the food pyramid. Of course, as soon as I hit print I lost my link, and haven't been able to find it again, but you could certainly make your own labels with construction paper.

I cut a couple of clouds out of card stock, and we punched holes in them, and the food group labels, so we could hang the clouds, with the labels below them, and finally, add on the food pictures under the proper label.

We hung the mobile over our table, so that we have a food shower going on in our dining room.

I like the way the activity turned out, the children seemed to be learning a lot about the different food groups. As usual, I found the new style pyramid a little cumbersome. I miss the tiny section at the top for sweets. I understand about moderation, but it doesn't seem realistic to bump fats, and sugars off entirely. Or, maybe I just don't like change.

At any rate, now that it's raining food in our house, we're ready to make a trip to ChewandSwallow to find out if the clouds are bestowing a balanced diet there.

It's great to be a homeschooler.