Feeding Kids Salads

Give kids a chance to like fresh, living foods. Beyond the regular finger foods of carrot and celery sticks, expose them to tasty salads. It's ok. Let them play with their food. The other night I served my 6-year-old some rice pasta and marinara sauce along with a small bowel of cabbage, carrot, and cilantro salad (no dressing). After only 2 bites of the pasta, she literally pushed her bowl aside and grabbed her bowl of salad. Gobbled it down and had 2 more helpings! This is now one of her favorites! "I could sing my mouth is so happy!" she told me.

So how do you get kids to like living salads?

• Expose them to the salad at high-hungry times (after physical activities, snack times, before meals). So what if they fill up before dinner... it's the best thing they can eat!
• Eat living salads yourself, and often (do as I do, not as I say)
• Make games of it: "Are you a rabbit?? Here's your munchy, crunchy meal!"
• Ask them intriguing questions: "Can you tell the difference between the red and green cabbage?"
• Constant exposure pays off. It may take 1 or 250 times before they'll try it, but persistence pays off, especially when they are hungry. It becomes a "known factor" to them. So keep it visible!
• Be Creative and let them gravitate towards their natural instincts to eat living food.

Great Spiritual Experiments for Kids (Part 2)

Here's Part 2 of Shannon's Spiritual Experiements with kids.

This one covers the

1. Power of Habits
   
2. Power of Intention and Focus
   
3. Power of Perspective & Awareness
   

I would even recommend taking the Habit Experiment further.

Negative Habits: If you are dealing with breaking a negative habit (and don't have the power to break the think string (or rope as we sometimes have), demonstrate with the kids that they can unravel it bit by bit until there are only a bunch of small strings that can easily be broken). This demonstrates that we can break a large negative habits by taking consistent small small steps until the the habit is completely unraveled.

Postive Habits: Likewise, if we want to build positive and healthy habits, show kids how to make a rope by taking a bunch of thin strings (weak habits) and braiding them together (to make a strong rope/habit over time). Keep increasing it until it is so strong they it won't break. This demonstrates the power of a healthy habit that has had a lot of focus, attention, and time on to build.

Great Spiritual Experiments for Kids (Part 1)

Thanks Shannon for making these videos of Spiritual Experiments for kids! These experiments cover the concepts of

1. Universal Life Essence, Life & Death
2. Negative vs. positive thinking, unhealthy food clogging minds,
3. What we choose to lean on people, leaning on God/Spirit
4. Opening our minds to God/Spirit to let the best of ourselves come out
   

As my own daughter has been curious about the concept of death, I think your ice-cube experiment is excellent. In fact, I'm hoping to make a video to elaborate on it further. Beginning with a large bowl of water that represents all life (God, Universe, Earth, All People, All Animals, Everything...). Then have the child take some of the water out of the large bowl and put it in an ice-cube tray. Once they are formed, we could call that birth of our bodies or our form here. (But we are still made up of the the same life essence, and still connected). Then, as you show in your experiment, we are put back into the bowl and melt back into all life essence, and experience "death" of form. But we are still all together, as we always were. :)