Supermarket Scavenger Hunt

Trips to the grocery store don't have to be painful for you or your young ones. In fact, you can make your weekly or monthly trips to the store into fun for the whole family. After creating a healthy shopping list, divvy it up into smaller scavenger hunt lists for your children.

When your kids are still very young and not yet reading, you can lead them down the aisle and let them "help" you find nonbreakable items, such as cardboard boxes of macaroni. Once your children are old enough to read, you can allow them to find items in the supermarket on their own. Reward your children with effusive praise for accomplishing their tasks, and when you get home, enlist their cooperation in tasting each of the items they helped to locate.

Besides making the chore of food shopping fun and interactive for your kids, the scavenger hunt strategy has the added and long-lasting benefit of interesting your kids in food and in food labels. Of course, it also allows them to feel needed and responsible, and in that frame of mind they may be more interested in helping you cook and in tasting your creations!

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Excerpted from:

From Raising Healthy Eaters: 100 Tips for Parents by Henry Legere, M.D. Copyright � 2004. Used by arrangement with The Perseus Books Group.

To order this book visit perseusbooksgroup.com.

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