Healthy Food & Healthy Living to Satisfy a Child's Mind, Body & Soul

iTunes and Food Celebration

Each month for our "Food Celebration", the children (with assistance from adults) choose a vegetarian dish to cook (eg: Italian/Spanish). It is a joint effort and to add to the general feel of the day, they get dressed up in a token piece of clothing eg: (Sombrero/Kimono). In line with the theme, we have music to suit the occassion.The initiative is a celebration of food and cultures and a great way for the children to be involved in the cooking of healthy foods. In addition they learn to appreciate and get to explore food from other cultures.

I chose to use iTunes for one of my social resources, because we always have music playing throughout the day.  iTunes is a digital media application devoted to music. It lets you download music, listen to music, buy music, share music and even create your own playlists. Integrated into iTunes is Ping, a social network application, and like Twitter and Facebook it lets you share your thoughts and use social plug tools such as a "like" button to illustrate your approval of other people's music selection and you can follow artists. I chose to use Ping to create my playlists. It lets you do this by using a search engine to search artists and songs, add songs to your playlist and even listen for free to 30 second snippets of the music chosen. Once published iTunes users can listen to your playlists, post comments, add their own music to your playlists and even purchase the collection. I created the following three playlists for my event:

Music Selection for Mid Morning - Early Afternoon

Playlist 1 was chosen for the mid morning - early afternoon time of the day. During this time, the kids are outside in the garden gathering vegetables and inside preparing and cooking the main meal and dessert. Keeping in line with the "Spanish Theme", a selection of songs from well known latino pop artists have been chosen. The style of music playing across this period can best be described as "dance pop feel good", picked to boost and brighten their mood.

Music Selection for Mid Afternoon - Fiesta

Playlist 2 was created for the mid-afternoon part of the occassion. This part of the day always involves laughter and boisterous activity due to games such as dancing and a pinjata. With this in mind, I chose music with a more upbeat and uplifting feel to it. Latino music is renknowned for being wonderfully colourful and loaded with percussion, through its use of congos and maraccas.

Music Selection for Afternoon - Siesta

Playlist 3. This music selection is for the end of the day. At this stage the kids are often tired, full and winding down to go home. During this time we are throwing around ideas about what to cook next month and what the theme be (the internet is used to search ideas). The music playing is still by latino artists, but much more mellow, with a softer vibe.

Refer to attachment below for My PlayLists and Instructions on How to Create a New Playlist Using Ping.