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Meals & Nutrition
Promoting Healthy Habits
Promoting Healthy Habits
We believe a healthy child is a happy child. Puss In Boots Early Childhood Learning Centre has a responsibility to help children to develop good food practices and approaches, by working with families and educators. All food prepared by the Service or families will endeavor to be consistent with the Australian Dietary Guidelines and provide children with 50% of the recommended dietary intake for all nutrients. Food will be served at various times throughout the day to cater for all children’s nutritional needs. Meal times reflect a relaxed and pleasant environment where educators engage in meaningful conversations with children. Educators will role model healthy eating behaviour. This assists in creating a positive and enjoyable eating environment.
Breastfeeding
Puss In Boots will encourage and support all families to continue breastfeeding their child until at least 12 months, in line with current recommendations. Our service recognises that families have the right to decide whether they will breastfeed their child while they are in care, and each family’s decision will be accepted and respected. Our service will work with families with children who are breastfed by providing a supportive environment by feeding children expressed breast milk supplied by their families and by providing suitable spaces and resources to mothers breastfeeding their babies at the childcare centre.
Educators will:
- Encourage and support breastfeeding and appropriate introduction of solid foods.
- Provide a suitable place within the service where mothers can breastfeed their babies or express breast milk.
- Support mothers to continue breastfeeding until babies are at least 12 months of age while offering appropriate complementary foods from around 6 months of age.
- Ensure the safe handling of breast milk and infant formula including transporting, storing, thawing, warming, preparing and bottle feeding.
Food Choices
Our educators play an important role in supporting children to develop a healthy and positive attitude towards good food choices. They do this through strategies and activities such as:
- Encouraging younger children and toddlers to talk about ‘healthy’ and ‘not so healthy’ food choices early on.
- Providing children with opportunities to eat food and engage in the mealtime routines of different cultures.
- Talking with children about nutritious food during mealtimes. Our staff also model healthy eating practices for children.
- Making sure mealtimes are pleasant occasions, where children and staff can socialise with each other.
- Allowing children to exercise their independence and to make some choices during mealtimes.
- Including healthy food toys in the ‘home corner’ at the service to encourage children’s investigative play.
Your child’s holistic health is important to us which is why we make drinking water available for every child throughout the day. We encourage families to provide water bottles clearly named so children can access water whenever they wish.
Special Dietary Needs
Some children may have very specific food requirements due to allergies/food intolerances, their cultural background or other family preferences. Our service will work with families to make sure individual children’s needs are met. We take special care to ensure that food allergies and special dietary needs dictated by medical conditions are catered for.
Our educators will help children understand the seriousness of allergies and the importance of knowing the signs of anaphylaxis, along with ways they can support their friends. We believe children are never too young to look out for one another and we all want to be included and made to feel part of the community.