"Eat your vegetables! They are good for you," is a common admonition from parents to children, who are encouraged to eat foods rich in vitamins and minerals. However, they might not know too much about specific nutritional information regarding these nutrients. Parents can help their children learn more about the benefits of vitamins and minerals with a few, simple, at-home activities.
Visual Aids
Using art projects is a fun and effective way to teach kids about vitamins and minerals. Younger children can cut out pictures of food from magazines or grocery store sales papers, classify them by vitamin or mineral group, then glue them to construction paper. Older children can make a vitamin and mineral chart with sections for vitamin names and benefits of each one, along with recommended daily allowances and foods in which they are commonly found. This would be a handy resource to keep in the kitchen.
Experiments
Parents do not have to be scientists to help their child conduct a few simple experiments at home. Kids can learn much about vitamins and minerals with a hands-on approach. Science Made Simple, a science project website, has several experiments that require few materials. Children can use frozen and fresh fruit juice to compare vitamin C content or extract and weigh the iron from breakfast cereal.
Cooking
Kids and parents alike can learn more about vitamins and minerals with some joint cooking projects. They can plan and cook meals that target the most essential vitamins and minerals. Parents can use this opportunity to teach kids about proper food portions, as well as the benefits of eating foods that are natural sources of vitamins. Nutrition.gov provides nutritional charts, as well as the vitamin and mineral content in hundreds of food items.
Games
Games are another fun option for teaching kids about vitamins and minerals. The Internet gives children several options with online interactive quizzes and puzzles. Kids can take multiple-choice quizzes that reinforce knowledge of vitamin and mineral names, as well as the health conditions that each one affects. Pro Profs, an educational game website, has several word-search puzzles of varying difficulty levels in which kids find and click on vitamin and mineral names until they find all in the list.
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