Activities That Support Food Education in Early Learning Settings

“We should teach children to eat as we teach them to read, but we don’t.” This was said by Karen Le Billon, a professor at the University of British Columbia and author of French Kids Eat Everything.

She is very much right. None of us is inclined to assume children are born knowing how to read and write, right? Well, that’s why schools exist and we are all meant to send our children there to learn those skills.

This is the case with pretty much everything in a person’s life. We must learn most things that we will need to live a good life and develop to the fullest. This includes eating. We must be taught how to do it(1).

Early childhood educators - and parents - tend to feel challenged by children’s refusal of foods and meals. Many give up on trying to getting the children to eat their ‘healthy’ foods after a few attempts to then simply assume that it’s a fact that the child “doesn’t like it” or worse, that they have a fussy eater in their hands, and there’s not much that they can do about it. But there is so much educators can do about it…

In my experience as an early childhood educator and as a children’s nutritionist, I’ve learned that we can break this cycle if we apply the exact same strategies that we use to teach typically developing children learn how to write and read.

Manipulating playdough can strengthen little hands and fingers for the tricky task of writing later on

In preparation for learning to write, we provide children with activities like playdough, colouring in, painting on an easel, threading. We don’t sit them down, at about the time they have just started to walk, give them a pencil and a piece of paper and ask them to trace the alphabet. And yet, to many educators, it is frustrating when a toddler chooses to eat just the pasta and leave the Bolognese sauce behind in their bowl.

Some educators will take charge in ‘fixing’ that child’s behaviour. Disregarding the service’s Food & Nutrition policy – sometimes this is inexistent anyway – they will determine rules such as “you don’t have to eat it, but you have to try”, or punishment or bribery such as “you can’t have dessert if you don’t eat your lunch” or try reasoning like “veggies make your muscles strong”.

Reasoning and teaching when a child may already be in their ‘defensive mode’ and their learning capacity reduced due to the anxiety caused by a rush of adrenaline in their nervous system(1), is counter-productive and may make things even worse(2).

Evidence is there to show us that this type or coercion, if it works, it works temporarily and has to be used time and time again because once the adult stops doing it, the child will not willingly eat that food object of coercion. That child was responding to an external reason and not because they wanted to eat it(2).

If we, instead, like we do to support children’s writing skills, plan curriculum activities that allow food exploration free of pressure to eat, children will feel safer and more relaxed to learn all that they want to learn about foods of their interest, taking their time in doing so.

For example, in an early childhood classroom, reading a book featuring foods, let’s say, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Then having the home corner set up with toy apples, oranges, plums, strawberries and pears, maybe some of the other foods the caterpillar feasts on as well, children can learn about how different those toys may look when compared with the pictures in the book, like how different they are in shape and colour. Conversations can also be triggered about how those fruits are eaten: whole, peeled, sliced, as juice, cooked etc.

This opens the gates of children’s curiosity about those foods which may lead to them being inclined to try those foods next time they are on the menu. Research shows that this type of activity is relevant to children’s food education and that it significantly increases their intake of fruit and vegetables(3, 4).

Similarly, songs, art crafts and games that feature foods, all have been researched as valuable to provide opportunities for children to learn about foods and widen their range of accepted foods, improving their eating patterns(5). As well as the obvious activities such as cooking and gardening(3, 5).

These are teaching opportunities educators can take to scaffold typically developing children’s food literacy which have the potential to make mealtimes all the more pleasant for all at the service, big and small.

Eat Play Learn Nutrition strives to support educators and other early education professionals to skill up in order to carry food education with confidence. Learn about our workshops.

References

1.       S.O.S. Approach to Feeding – Dr. Kay Toomey, Dr, Erin Ross & Susan Kniffen. (Conference, 2022, Australia)

2.       Changing children's eating behaviour - A review of experimental research (Study, 2017, Denmark). 

3.       Exposure to foods’ non-taste sensory properties. A nursery intervention to increase children’s willingness to try fruit and vegetables (Study, 2014, UK/Malaysia).

4.       Peas, please! Food familiarization through picture books helps parents introduce vegetables into pre-schoolers' diets (Study, 2018, UK). 

5.       Using repeated exposure through hands-on cooking to increase children's preferences for fruits and vegetables (Study, 2019, USA).