Hi. Today in our Health and Safety course, we are going to be talking about Nutrition in Early Childhood. We're going to be talking about the importance of providing good nutrition to children, and also teaching them healthy habits that will hopefully last throughout their adulthood. Beginning nutrition education in early childhood is an important part of helping to ensure that children will achieve healthy lifestyles. So important for us to be talking about nutrition and physical activity and the importance of a healthy lifestyle. What is nutrition education and why is it important? It is necessary to build a foundation of healthy lifestyle choices for children to lead a healthy, happy, and productive lives. It is important for their academic performance. Children who are provided good nutrition seem to do better in school, and nutrition education should align with the National Health Education Standards from the CDC. There's a link here if you would like to look into those a little bit more. How can we teach nutrition? These are just a few ideas, it's not any way inclusive of everything that you would be doing, but just a few ideas that maybe you could use with your children. We should be teaching children in our classrooms, in our rooms every day. We should be talking about good food choices, healthy food choices. We can do that in our play activities, we can do that in our interests areas, we can do that at our mealtimes, we can do that at our snack times, outdoor play. There's no boundary of where nutrition education has to be. We may include it in all parts of our curriculum. Some examples or ideas. Counting or sorting with pictures of fruits and vegetables. There are also manipulatives that you can purchase, which are fruits and vegetables, so different ways that you can do this activity. Counting and sorting is a great math activity, so you're including math in with your nutrition. Learning math skills by measuring ingredients for a recipe. Measurement is an important skill that we should be working on with young children. They're not going to understand totally half a cup, three-quarters of a cup, one cup, but they're going to understand that we're putting certain amounts in, w We're following a recipe, we're following directions, all that's important for children to understand when we're making recipes. Cooking is such a great activity to be doing with young children. Involving them in the cooking process often makes them more susceptible or they might want to try the foods that you prepare or that they prepare with you. If you are cooking with fruits and vegetables and you're involving children in cutting up the vegetables, and then making adepth to dip the vegetables in. They might be more out to try it, than if you just put that in front of them as their snack. Having plants in your classroom is a great idea. There are some root gardens that can be purchased in different catalogs where the roots, there's a Plexiglas and you can see the roots of the vegetables or whatever it is you're growing. Carrots are really cool to grow in there, because you can see the carrots growing underground. You can also include some math activities in growing activities by measurement, by talking about how many days that things happen. You could talk about science by what plants need to grow. Incorporating different ideas and different learning activities into your nutrition education is really easy. Learning about cultural food traditions. We want to include culture and cultural education in many of our activities and in our overall classrooms. Talk if you have children who are from different cultures in your classroom, get together with their parents. Ask what kind of food traditions do they have in their culture, what are the major foods that they serve at holidays, or even in just their home. Maybe the families might be willing to come in and help you prepare some of these foods. I just want you to be careful when you're talking about culture though, that you don't limit it to just food, because a culture is not defined by just their food. There are many more aspects to it. So if you are studying a culture and you're doing the foods for that culture, look at other things in that culture and not just the food, so that children really get a well-rounded view and understand what that culture involves. Another idea is farm to school. You don't really have to live in an agricultural community to participate in some of these activities, but if you do, then wonderful. Purchasing active or foods from local farmers and local farms stands anything like that, is a great way to show children and to help them understand where food comes from. That it doesn't necessarily come from a grocery store which some children think. You've talked about where it grows. Maybe you could take pictures of the farm standard pictures of the farmer's field and bring those in to show where these fruits and vegetables are grown. But if you do not live near a farming community or in an agricultural community, you can still talk about where these items grow and you can do that. There are so many resources online that you can show pictures, you can show farmers tilling with tractors. You can maybe even, there are probably videos that farmers talk about how that they grow their vegetables or fruits or whatever it is. If you don't have that really near you and access to hands on, then you still can educate children on where these items are coming from and how they grow. Then doing some hands-on learning. Gardening, cooking, field trips are all great activities for really true understanding for children. Having a school garden, if you are year-round facility and you're able and you have a place on your playground to have a school garden children learn so much from that, just that opportunity to grow and see where things come from and look at that from the seed part all the way up till when you eat the item is really amazing and children are going to get excited about it. They're going to be what they're going to want to taste, what is in that garden and they're going to bring that home to their parents. Lima beans are really fun to grow. If you don't have a place for a school garden, you can grow them right in your window, in a plastic bag with a paper towel in there with water. Lima beans grow great just in that. Tape it into your window where there's sun and as it starts to sprout, you can take it out and plant it in small pots and send those home with the children. Lots of different ideas and activities for children to be seeing how fruits and vegetables grow, where they come from and what it looks like. In a garden, you are increasing their knowledge of nutrition you're talking about the healthy foods that you're growing. You're increasing their willingness to try these foods because like I said, if they're participating in the whole process, they're going to be excited about trying it and eating it when it's ready. Fostering positive attitudes about fruits and vegetables is so important that it's not often talked about at home, maybe as much as we would in a classroom. Talking about fruits and vegetables and having them available for children is so important for their positive attitudes and if they have positive attitudes when they're young, that often follows through as they grow older. Also offering information to parents and families. Offering them recipes, if you're doing things in recipes and school, send them home the recipe and say, we tried this in school, maybe you could try it at home. Even recipes that you don't try, but articles that you find about good nutrition websites, anything that you can educate families, is very, very important for us to be doing. One important agency that we should be looking into, if you're starting your home home daycare, you want to look into the child and adult Care Food Program. CACFP is often what you're going to hear. It's just the initials. It is a federal program that provides reimbursements for nutrition snacks, and meals for eligible children, and adults participating in care facilities. You have to be a licensed or registered childcare provider. In order to receive these services, you have to follow their guidelines for meals and snacks, which are very specific on what you serve are children each meal portion size and food group wise. There is a great website that we will look at later, which will give us more information. This program is sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture. The CACFP contributes to the wellness, healthy growth, and development of young children and adults in the United States. That quote was taken right from their website. You have to be an approved program, like I said, you're registered or your licensed and then you apply to participate in the program. Once you're approved, then you may claim reimbursement for up to two meals and one snack every single day. It might not be the full amount. It might depend upon the child's family's income and how much reimbursement you get. But anyway, you're going to get something which is really important because we all know we operate on a tight budget. Also the CACFP, in addition to providing the reimbursements, they assist and train childcare providers in how to provide nutritious meals. They give you ideas, they train you, they tell you how to maybe prepare meals, what foods to buy that would be best for your area and best for the children in your care. Who can participate in CACFP? Programs who care for and serve meals to children and adults. It's the child and adult Care Food Program, so adults in nursing homes. Nursing homes can also apply for this. It's not just for child daycare centers. The eligible centers or agencies can include childcare centers, family care programs, head start, emergency shelters, and adult daycare centers. What are the benefits of being involved in CACFP? There are benefits for children because they are receiving the proper nutrition they need for their appropriate development. Because the CACFP has the guidelines that tell you what you need to serve and you have to document this every single meal, every single day. You have to submit this paperwork in order for you to get reimbursement. The agency staff comes into your programs and they evaluate you. Sometimes they help you out, they make sure that you're following their guidelines. It also instills a positive curious attitude about food because you are providing them with a vegetable and fruit and a grain and a protein at every single meal. You don't want to always provide green beans or corn because those are the most common vegetables probably that children eat. You don't want those all the time. It makes you think about what else can I serve these children that might be fun and then they might enjoy. I have seen videos and articles about participants in the program and it's really interesting that in one video they're serving quiche for breakfast, and the children are eating it, they're eating it. If you provide children with different foods, they might not like it the first time. They might not like it the second time. But eventually, they're going to be familiar with it, maybe a little comfortable, and they might try it and decide they like it. It creates a lifelong healthy eating habits and attitudes for children. By providing them with this variety when they're young, that follows through. Their benefits for parents. It provides a guarantee that the children are receiving healthy, nutritious meals. Because they're receiving healthy and nutritious meals, they're going to do better academically, they're going to have better mental health, are going to have better physical health. There are benefits for providers. We already talked about the reimbursement. Reimbursement is very important, but there also is a lot of valuable education that you are going to receive from the CACFP, education on nutrition and healthy attitudes and healthy lifestyle. There are a lot of online resources available through CACFP. I have some of them here for you to take a look at. The first one is the CACFP website. The second one is called Kid care. You can purchase business management software for the child and adult for care programs. It's going to help you to organize. I'm not promoting this, I just found this on the available resources for CACFP. That's why I'm including it in here. It's promoted on their websites, so I'm giving it to you also. MyPlate is a great resource for families, it's a great resource for childcare providers. It gives you tips, recipes, it talks about nutrition, it tells you the serving sizes for children, it talks about all of the different food groups, and it gives you recipes of different ways to prepare different foods, it's a really great resource and I really encourage everyone to go in and explore that resource and we'll talk about a little bit more, I think in the next slide. Some other resources through CACFP are Eat Well Play Hard. There's two different sections, one for centers and one for family daycare. It's going to give you just some ideas and handouts and information on healthy living. MyPlate, I give this website to all of my students and we go through it and we look at all of the different things that you can find on here and here are some of them. You can learn about all the food groups. There is one section and this is for families, so it's a great resource for you to supply to families. It's called healthy eating on a budget and it talks about, if you don't have a lot of excess money, how can you still eat healthy. There are great recipes on here for all different kinds of foods and I have made some in my classroom and some of my children, I've also used it and made some of them at home, they're very interesting in different recipes using healthy nutritious foods. There is nutrition information on here ranging from pregnancy to older adults, and it's categorized by age group and you can go in and find what you are looking for pretty easily. It's easy to navigate website. There is a section where, and this is another good one for families to make a healthy eating plan because sometimes it's hard to figure out where to start and where to go and what to do if you want to start eating healthy and this gives you guidance in that. There's a lot of print material on this website, and it is free to use. It's free to print and handout and give to the families in your care. It gives ideas on, again, recipes, it gives ideas on how to shop best. It also talks about physical development and how to best enhance that. Lots of different information in there. There are a lot of videos that you can view, and it's also available in Spanish. Over here on the right-hand side you see the plate over there, this replaces the old food pyramid. This is really easy to understand and really easy to show children and to show families. You can actually buy this plastic plate on the website. I found one at a thrift store one time and I bought it and I bring it in to show it to my students. It's very easy to understand and what it is showing you is most of your meal should be vegetables, and fruits and vegetables should take up half of your plate. Protein looks like it's the smallest piece on there. We talk a lot about usually your protein is your main part of your meal, you think, oh, I'm going to cook chicken tonight, what can I have with that? But make sure that you're really thinking about the other foods that you're going to serve with the chicken because they make up most of the plate. The dairy in the side is shaped like a glass. It's in a circle, so that would be the milk. "Investing in early child nutrition is a sure-fire strategy. The returns are incredibly high." I actually have two votes at the end of this one because I couldn't decide which ones I wanted to include. Here's the other one. "The lack of access to proper nutrition is now only fueling obesity, it is leading to food insecurity and hunger among our children." Something to think about as you move forward. Thank you.