Healthy Lunch - Kinder Style

Wednesday last week was a big huge gigantic day for Kindergarten at my school. It was the culmination of our term of work on Healthy Choices. Our final activity was to host a Healthy Lunch and invite the families of our 46 students to school.

The menu was decided!

The RSVP's rolled in......116! Yikes!

So the prep began!
It began like this...plus 2 other trolleys!

The many hours we spent shopping then had to be translated into the hours we needed to spend CHOPPING!. I didnt get a photo of all the prep, but the teachers of my school (for the most part) were so supportive and fantastic! The last chopper left school at 9.30pm the night before the lunch.

Ill let the pics take up the story now!

Very hygenic! I did have to give lots of gloves to one boy in particular. He would take his turn at 'making' and then exclaim "This looks yum!" Then his hand would go straight in his mouth. I was killing myself laughing!

We divided into 4 groups and each group prepared 3 dishes. My group made Garden Salad, Crunchy Noodle Salad and Wraps

How cool is the watermelon shark? You have probably seen it on Pinterest? Well someone was showing this pic around when we were chopping and my awesome boss says....I can do that! So watermelon shark was born! I think kids who didnt even like watermelon had a try of some out of his mouth.

Our hall was so full of happy families and kids who were so proud of themselves.

It was a lot of effort and come Thursday morning there were some VERY tired teachers but it was so totally worth it.

Nutrition in school...real or myth?

I write this post as I am one day through a 2 day Professional Development course. The course titled "Live Life Well @ School" aims to promote nutrition and fundamental movement skills in schools, creating healthier kids which should in turn create healthier learners.


But does a healthy school environment exist?


I think about my own eating habits that I model to the kids. I usually dont get a chance to eat in front of the kids  but my biggest contributor to influencing decisions they may make about food is Coke. Yep Coke. Until today, I thought nothing of grabbing the coke at the end of lunch and taking it out on the playground or into my classroom. What message am I sending to my kids?

Part of this PD is to come up with an action plan to implement into your school to improve nutrition and fundamental movement skills (FMS). When we examined what our school 'had', we actually realised how badly Health is suffering.

So our nutrition part of the action plan is to address eating and drinking. We plan to introduce a Crunch and Sip break where students may eat fruit and veg during class time and sip water. We also plan to purchase school drink bottles to encourage students to reach their daily intake of water each day.

Down the track, we also plan to introduce a "Taste Test Tuesday" where students try new fruit and vegies. One small step at a time...

So the question, do you have a healthy school environment which is conducive to healthy, happy learners? 

I know as teachers we have a lot to educate our kids about. But with rates of obesity growing and growing, we need to step in.