Healthy Eating Children's Song Children Clap Their Hands

The core value of "Healthy Eating Nursery Rhymes for Kids Clap Your Hands" is to transform complex knowledge points of early childhood food education into interactive content that conforms to the cognitive rules of 3-6-year-old children. The memory retention rate is more than three times that of traditional preaching. It is currently one of the most popular implementation tools in the enlightenment stage of food education in public kindergartens in China.

I have been promoting food education for young children for almost five years. When I was doing a pilot project in a public park in Haidian last year, I didn’t believe it at first. At that time, I went to class with a stack of meal pagoda posters and animated short films. I told the middle class children to “eat more dark green vegetables and drink less sugary drinks.” The children in the middle class either picked their nails or pulled the pigtails of the people next to them. When I asked questions during the class, eight out of ten said they remembered “eat Skittles”, which made me laugh and cry.

Later, Teacher Li, a senior preschool teacher in the kindergarten, gave me an idea, saying that instead of talking about nonsense, try incorporating the knowledge points into clapping children's songs. We spent a week changing the content, including all the bad eating habits that children often commit, and added interactive actions, such as showing a big heart when singing "Fresh fruits and vegetables first", shaking hands when singing "Do not eat expired food", and leading everyone in the 10-minute transition period after morning exercises to sing and clap. Don't tell me, only two weeks later, some parents came to give feedback, saying that their children were holding their hands to prevent them from buying sausages from an unlicensed stall at the entrance of the community, and they were saying, "Don't eat the three-no products. If you have a stomachache, no one will help you."

What's interesting is that last week I went to the kindergarten for a return visit, and I happened to meet the children from the first class holding the children from the first class and singing songs in the corridor. A little boy with a round face took a bite of the fried chicken drumstick sent by his father. He suddenly stopped and said, "You shoot five, I shoot five, and I need to eat less junk food." Then he put the remaining drumstick back into his father's hand and said, "Take a bite today and eat next week," which made the parents next to him very amused.

Of course not everyone agrees with this approach. Some food education colleagues who are doing academic research have mentioned that the content of this kind of rhyming children's songs is too shallow and cannot cover personalized issues such as special physiques and food allergies. Some parents feel that the content is too dogmatic. For example, the original version said "ice drinks and cold foods should not be touched." Some parents came to them and said that it was okay to eat ice cream occasionally in the summer. The last time their children ate a cone, they cried for a long time in the kindergarten. They said that they had done something unhealthy, but they had a psychological burden.

We later revised several versions, and the current universal version has long since changed the absolute expressions, "can't touch" to "touch less", and left blank spaces for different kindergartens and families to add content themselves - kindergartens in coastal areas can add "you shoot seven and I will shoot seven, seafood is cooked before eating", and classes with children with allergies can add "you shoot nine, I will shoot nine, and don't touch allergic foods", which is very flexible. Oh, by the way, some families have also added their family's dietary taboos into the family. For example, a child's grandma has diabetes, so they made up the sentence "If you shoot ten, I will shoot ten, and grandma won't eat candies." During the song, they even went to high-five the grandma, which turned into a small interactive program for grandparents and grandchildren.

In fact, the current views in the food education circle are not unified. Some schools advocate letting children grow vegetables and cook in the kitchen to perceive food, while others advocate using picture books and immersive animations as content input. In the final analysis, the clapping nursery rhyme is a low-cost, highly popular and lightweight tool, and there is no need to argue about who is better or worse. We now use them in the garden: we sing children's songs first to get familiar with them, and then we take the children to plant tomatoes and lettuces. When they are ripe, we wash them and make salads. Last time, a child held up the tomatoes he planted and said to me, "It is said in the nursery rhyme that fresh fruits and vegetables come first. Mine is the first place in the first place." His eyes were as bright as stars.

To be honest, after doing food education for so long, I no longer insist on telling parents and children about the ratio of macronutrients and the levels of the dietary pagoda. Just like this clapping nursery rhyme, there is nothing advanced in it. It just jumps and sings a few times. The children can remember it in their minds, be willing to take an extra bite of green vegetables when eating, and know how to drag parents away when they see the Sanwu stall on the roadside. This is better than anything else.