Teach your preschool students about the benefits of vegetables by featuring hands-on food activities. Encourage them to adorn mini-pizzas with their favorite veggies. They can even make faces on the pizzas. Talk about the benefits of the different ingredients. For example, you could say that tomatoes and green peppers have vitamin C -- along with a lot of other nutrients. Most preschool students don’t know how to write, but you can still teach them about nutrients just by talking about vitamins and eating good foods. Allow them to choose from a bowl full of vegetables and ask them why they picked certain ones.
Show your preschool class how to grow certain vegetables such as peas, carrots, lettuce and tomatoes. Talk about the type of soil vegetables need and the tools used in garden such as a tiller, rake, shovel and compost. Create the garden with your class on school property -- if you can. If not, the students can decorate ceramic pots by painting vegetables on the exterior, filling the pots with potting mix and planting their vegetables. The pots can go on a table near a window in the class and the children can watch their creations grow. You can also show the youngsters slide shows about vegetable gardening and give them seed packets to take home.
Preschool students usually love to color and you can find vegetable coloring pages for them to decorate online. Print out pages of vegetables and help them color and cut them out after coloring. The children can then glue the finished colored vegetables on collages and decorate the rest of the page with stickers or cut out pictures from magazines. Coloring, along with cutting and pasting crafts always works well for preschoolers because these children range in age from 2 to 4 years old and the crafts help them improve their hand-eye-coordination skills. You can also encourage them to decorate small wicker baskets and then fill the baskets with a few vegetables for them to enjoy. Give the children silk flowers, ribbons and other embellishments to create custom baskets.
Include songs or stories in your vegetable lesson plans for the day. Singing or reading about vegetables may get the children excited about the rainbow of veggies available to them. Write your own songs and sing them along with the children or find specific melodies online. Sing songs right after reading a book to help the lesson from the story stick. Choose books such as “Vegetables” by Sarah Anderson, “Vegetables of India” by Jill Hartley and “Growing Vegetable Soup” by Lois Ehlert.