Shaping the future
Food play for
Early Years
Encouraging children to eat and enjoy a healthy, varied diet and developing positive nutritional behaviours is fundamental to their development. Many factors including increasing costs, the rise in the availability of processed foods, reduced cooking skills and busy lifestyles have all impacted on children’s diets and ultimately their future well-being.
Early years settings and schools have a significant role to play in shaping children’s food preferences and developing behaviours around food choices and mealtimes. An ideal medium for children’s learning is food play.
Food play provides an opportunity to expose children to foods they may not be familiar with, providing new tastes and textures. As children learn through their own experiences, planning opportunities for them to play and experiment with ‘healthy’ foods can implicitly develop their understanding of the choices that are better for them.
Food play can be planned for a specific purpose, such as preparing a snack or lunch or it can simply be an opportunity for child-led learning as they explore through role play, food handling, songs and stories.
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By The Food Teacher, Katharine Tate