February Cloverbud 4 H Meeting

This month for our 4 H meeting, I decided to do a meeting on Food and Nutrition.  Chelsea volunteered to do a talk on "My Plate" for me and we were able to borrow some visuals from the Extension office t go along with her talk.

I tried to come up with a fun idea for a craft.  Lily and I just did a healthy foods collage the other day, and that was fun but it is something most of the children have done at least once before.  I read online about doing fruit and vegetable paintings using the fruits and vegetables as stamps.  I had several fruits and veggies at my house, the club had paint, and the office has paint brushes, paper, and more paint, so I thought it would make a fun craft.  We used strawberries, apples, oranges, celery, bananas,and broccoli.  They didn't turn out as well as I had thought they would, but the children seemed to have fun.

For our snack the children made ants on a log and fruit and yogurt parfaits.  For the parfaits I bought vanilla yogurt, strawberries, blueberries, bananas, and kiwi, and let the children choose what fruits they wanted to add in.  They all really liked this snack!

One thing that is a challenge for me with this club is that I never know how many children will be there.  We had this burst of children last fall, and meetings we planned for around 15 children ended up with over 20.  Our pizza party in December had 22 children and I almost didn't have enough food!  But, our last two meetings have not had very many with this meeting only having 9 children (not counting Chelsea and Emelia) 5 of which were mine.  Our club has almost no money so we try to keep some of the meetings free and the others around $15.  We ask each child to contribute $1 per meeting to pay for supplies since none of the parents were interested in doing a fund raiser.  I spent $17 planning for 15-20 children for this meeting and only collected back $9.  Next month's meeting is on container gardening and each child will have their own container to plant in, so I am going to have to have those who are attending call,email, or text me so we can have enough supplies but not spend extra money and have a bunch left over.