🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• 🌍 Environmental Awareness — Understanding where food comes from and how food choices affect the planet begins the environmental literacy that leads to conscious, sustainable food choices throughout life.
• 🍽️ Independence & Life Skills — Learning to serve themselves, pour a drink, or prepare a simple snack builds practical independence and the self-care capability that kindergarteners need to manage their own nutrition during the school day.
• 💬 Vocabulary Expansion — Nutrition activities introduce rich vocabulary — nutrients, protein, fiber, harvest, ferment, season — expanding language range in a domain that connects directly to science, social studies, and health literacy.
• 🧁 Kitchen Science & Math — Cooking is applied chemistry and physics: watching bread rise, butter melt, or egg whites stiffen teaches cause-and-effect science while measuring cups and counting portions deliver authentic math in context.

By spring, taste buds are ready for fresh produce. The What's In Season Calendar for Preschoolers displays fruits and vegetables which are in season each month. Your preschooler will learn about where food comes from, that different plant foods are available naturally at certain times of the year, and that eating foods in season is very yummy. Plus, the What's In Season Calendar will remind you and your preschooler to plan meals with in-season produce and plan activities to learn about fruits and vegetables.

What You Will Need

Printer paper or construction paper
Magazines or seed catalogs for cutting out pictures of fruits and vegetables
Markers or Crayons
Glue
Paper Clips

What To Do

Step 1: Use one page for each month. You can do a few months to cover spring and summer or complete the whole year. Label the top of each page with the name of the month.

Step 2: Look through magazines or catalogs with your preschooler and cut out pictures of fruits and vegetables. Choose pictures of just the fruit/vegetable or choose pictures "on-the-vine" of the entire plant. Include your favorites but also include a few you or your preschooler would like to try for the first time.

You can also draw and color pictures of produce with your preschooler for the calendar. Or find a coloring book of produce, such as Fruits and Vegetables Coloring Book (Dover Pictorial Archives)

Step 3: Glue each fruit or vegetable onto the month's page that best represents the time when it is ripe and ready to eat. Leave about 1/3 of the page at the bottom blank for notes.

A good reference for seasonal produce for your state is - http://www.sustainabletable.org/shop/eatseasonal/

Or here is a general guide for common fruits and vegetables:

March - carrots, cauliflower, strawberries
April - asparagus, spring salad mix, strawberries, orange, grapefruit
May - asparagus, sweet onions, peas, strawberries
June - asparagus, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries
July - corn, summer squash, blueberries, peaches, nectarines
August - green beans, corn, summer squash, raspberries, melons, peaches, plums
September - cucumber, eggplant, tomatoes, apples, pears

Step 4: At the bottom of each page, make notes about dishes you'd like to try with that month's produce or activities you'd like to do, such as visiting a U-Pick farm.

Step 5: Attach pages with paper clip(s), leaving the current month on top and on prominent display in your kitchen.

Helpful Notes

1. The availability of fresh produce varies depending on where you live. Make your calendar local by focusing on produce that grows where you live.

2. A lot of produce is ripe and harvested over several months. Choose a month for a particular item based on when you'd like to plan meals around the item, or add it to many months.

3. If you have a vegetable garden or fruit trees, use your own harvest schedule to create the in-season calendar.

4. Add special stars or stickers to the calendar when you and your preschooler enjoy a new fruit or vegetable.

5. For a simpler calendar, make four pages, one for each season, instead of one for each month.

by Kati Chevaux

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