PBS Kids VIPS: Check out Our PEG + CAT’s “Great Banana” Fruit Salad & Craft

By Nancy Johnson Horn, Editor

We love this! PBS Kids is partnering up with Whole Foods Market to offer families tools to support healthy eating. You’ll be able to find free resources online and in Whole Foods Market locations across the country, including PEG + CAT follows the adorable, spirited Peg and her sidekick Cat as the embark on adventures. The new series premieres on PBS KIDS on Monday, October 7 (check local listings) and we’re going to show you a fun craft and fruit salad recipe you can do with your kids!

I love a series that features a female character AND Math! We made The Pirates’ Great Banana Fruit Salad Recipe and Craft Activity.

First we made the Pirate Chests.

You’ll Need:

1. Empty yogurt cups or small plastic containers
2. Paper (I used the paper bags from our Whole Foods Market Shop
3. Scissors
4. Markers or crayons
5. Tape

Directions:

1. Clean out the yogurt cups
2. Measure the height of the container with the long edge of the white paper. Since we used the paper bags, I used the yogurt cup.
3. Cut out the strip of paper, make sure it goes around your yogurt cup and that you will be able to tape it. Before you tape it,  decorate your paper. Don’t forget to draw a large lock on the front, so Big Mouth doesn’t swipe your banana slices!
4. Wrap the paper around your yogurt cup and secure with tape.

Then, make your fruit salad.

In each cup, put

5 banana slices
6 strawberry slices
7 grapes
8 peach slices (we substituted raspberries)
9 blueberries

You can actually substitute any cup up fruit, the point is to have your children count each amount of fruit and place it in their cup. We used organic for everything BUT the bananas.
To make this a little harder for my 2nd grader, I made him make big bowls of each fruit, but we needed enough for each of my three kids. So, he had to help me multiply the amount in each bowl. So 3 groups of 5 banana slices is 15 banana slices. He had to then put 15 banana slices in a bowl and this was repeated for the rest of the fruit that was needed. Then he had to count out his fruit salad from the bigger bowl, showing one to one correspondence.

 

For my kindergartner, I had her count the fruit in her own yogurt cup.

My kids really enjoyed eating from their treasure chest!

To add more fun to the mix, PBS KIDS and Whole Foods have created fun PEG + CAT recipes and activities for families. Go to PBS KIDS for recipes, tips, activities and games to encourage a lifetime of healthy eating online at http://pbskids.org/healthykids

 Thank you to PBS Kids and Whole Foods Market for providing instructions, recipes, and a gift card to purchase food for this project.