With the summer camp season fast approaching, we’re marking Nutrition Month by taking a closer look at healthy eating and promoting healthy habits. The following ideas are sure to inspire you as you go about creating your HH objective in connection with healthy eating.
Healthy eating goes hand in hand with cooking! There are several ways to hold cooking workshops at camp, whether you’re in a kitchen or outdoors, and whether you have plenty of kitchen tools, or just a few. Cooking workshops allow campers to discover a variety of foods, develop their culinary skills, and associate healthy eating with pleasure.
Are you interested in getting your campers to cook at camp, but don’t know where to start? Please view the guide entitled What’s Your Recipe? available on the Power Up portal, along with a multitude of tools for setting up your cooking workshops, and ideas galore for recipes.
People are becoming more and more aware of the importance of eating local, in terms of its impact on the environment and the local economy, not to mention its health benefits. Does this subject speak to you? The following ideas will help you address the issue at camp:
Organize various activities outside of camp, such as pick-your-own outings, and visits to farms or regional producers, or public markets, etc.
Offer your campers activities such as Local Chefs and Discovering Local Fruits and Veggies.
Planting a garden at camp is an ideal opportunity to help your campers understand what happens to their food before it reaches their table and to get them interested in healthy eating. What’s more, each camper, regardless of their age, can get involved by performing garden tasks.
Growing a garden at camp is not complicated! Who said a garden has to be planted in a large green space with grass, when raised beds with a few tomato plants will do trick. More than anything, the key to growing a garden at camp is to be organized!
The Gardener’s Toolbox shows you how to create a garden that’s adapted to your camp, guiding you at each step of the way. I Have a Green Thumb and What’s Growing? are two activities that will allow campers to discover sprouts.
You can address the subject of healthy eating without cooking or gardening! And you can do it by using sensory exploration.
How? By getting the campers to use all five of their senses to discover foods. Choose a specific food item and ask the campers to describe its taste, smell, texture and appearance, and the sound it makes when you bite into it.
In addition, sensory exploration helps campers enrich their vocabulary and develop a taste for exploring foods. This activity is a good opportunity for campers to discover or even broaden their dietary preferences, and become more open to tasting, discovering, exploring and cooking. If you’re interested, please view the tool entitled Tasting Expert.
Did you know that healthy eating can be fun without having food on hand? Our food cards and Let’s Explore Food game cards feature a full selection of games with variations for kids of all ages
Regardless of what the theme is at your summer camp, there are so many opportunities to approach healthy eating, whether at meal time, during breaks, or when moving around, etc. By combining all these opportunities, you can have a real impact on the adoption of healthy food habits among your campers.
Check out the Power Up portal to view our Healthy Eating tools and get inspired to include HH on your camp program!