About

There is so much more to food than just eating. Food provides a myriad of opportunities for powerful learning experiences for young children. 'Eating My Colourful Vegies and Fruit' supports early childhood educators with resources to involve children in hands-on food experiences such as exploring, tasting, preparing, sharing and finally recycling the waste. Through these experiences, children can:

• Learn and understand language,science and maths concepts, refine their hand-eye co-ordination and other small muscle skills and develop their curiosity and self-reliance.
• Expand their awareness of the variety and origins of food and practice life skills as beginner cooks.
• Build and extend their social competence and conversational abilities by sharing at meals with others.

The key food learning ideas in this resource include:

Be adventurous – try new food, especially green vegetable-type plant foods. Just be curious or try tiny tastes to start. Come along on an avocado tasting adventure!

Explore and choose from the rainbow of colourful vegetables and fruits as they provide a wide variety of important 'things' (called nutrients) for your body.

Extend your language and literacy through sensory food exploration and food preparation of raw vegies and fruit.

Develop a broader appreciation and understanding of the 'socialness' of food.

Use encouraging positive language when exploring and tasting new foods. Instead of "yucky" try "I don’t like it yet", "I like it a little bit" or "I'll try it again another time".This encourages respect for other people's food preferences and food culture.

There are five learning experiences in the resource. Each is presented in a consistent format involving a multi-step process that ensures meaningful and worthwhile food engagement and learning for children. The steps involve asking focus questions, stimulating curiosity and discussion, then moving on to hands-on food activity and finally encouraging reflection and sharing experiences with others.

Real vegetables and fruit are at the core of the learning experiences, and avocados feature in each experience. Centres are encouraged to source as many fresh vegetables and fruit as possible for the learning experiences. This can happen by approaching a local greengrocer, supermarket or even a grower in the community.

The Resource Creators

This resource has been developed by two highly qualified and experienced educators who understand the specialist area of child-centred food and nutrition education.

Shelley Woodrow

Shelley is an independent education consultant with 20 years experience in the development, production and delivery of high quality, multi-media, cross-curriculum education resources to teachers and students throughout Australia. With a degree in primary education and a post graduate diploma in museum education, her professional experience is broad ranging and includes a focus on child-centred food and nutrition education. Significant projects she has managed and co-authored include KidsGrow (gardening) and Hands On Food (food and nutrition), both national primary school initiatives.

Nadine McCrea

Nadine is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at University of New England, Armidale, NSW. For many years she has advocated for food learning pedagogy and pioneered a child-centred foodcycle approach. Nadine's PhD and other publications include: Early Childhood Foodcycle Learning – beliefs, happenings, management in three child care centres; Everyday Learning about Healthy Bodies; There's More to Food than Eating; 'Starting sustainability early...'; 'Food as shared living-and-learning'; 'What are your green educational values? Consider: Children as veggie gardeners'

Helping to meet desired learning outcomes

The learning experiences of the 'Eating My Colourful Vegies and Fruits' resource have been designed to support and complement the following early childhood initiatives:

• Being, Belonging, Becoming. The National Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (2009). In particular, outcomes related to health, wellbeing, identity, connection, engagement with learning, and communication. For example 'Children show increasing awareness of healthy lifestyles and good nutrition'; 'Children develop dispositions for learning' and 'Children take increasing responsibility for their own health and physical wellbeing.'
• National Quality Standard for Early Childhood Education and Care and School Age Care from COAG (2009).
• National, state and regional nutrition and health initiatives such as the National Dietary Guidelines; Go for 2 & 5; the National Obesity Strategy;Get Up & Grow, Healthy eating and physical activity for early childhood by Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing (2009); National Start Right, Eat Right Award Scheme; Munch and Move and Good for kids, good for life (NSW); Kids – 'Go for your life' (Victoria).

Please note that this program is intended for childcare and long day care centres with children aged 3 to 5 years. If you have any further queries, please contact earlychildhood@avocado.org.au.