Field Trips to Children’s Council!

By Amy Portello Nelson, Health and Nutrition Manager

Child care providers have a new reason to visit Children’s Council — playtime!

Our Health & Nutrition team hosts these field trips, called Fun Food Fitness Fridays. These outings help children learn ideas like “good for you” or “healthy” through playful activities. Our bigger goal is to encourage children to enjoy being active and eating nutritious food.

IMG_3369Each session welcomes about 20 children plus providers from two or three different child care programs. Children’s Council staff splits the children into three groups and leads them through three stations. At the physical activity station kids can play limbo, baseball, lift “weights” (water bottles), or have free time on the playground (generously shared by our neighbors at Mission Dolores Academy).

The cooking station demonstrates safe hand washing then teaches kids about the ingredients they’ll use before preparing a healthy snack.

At the gardening station children play in the dirt with shovels and buDSC_0021ckets and discover things in a garden, including flowers, (fake) bugs and snakes, and more. The kids also plant seeds that they can take home.

After rotating through all three stations, the children come back together and eat the snacks they prepared while listening to a children’s story about food.

Feedback from these early sessions has been extremely positive. Providers told us that the children loved the activities and can’t wait to attend again. Providers also enjoyed the laidback opportunity to get to know each other and be in a new setting. Some have also indicated that seeing the children try new things, like safely cutting fruit with plastic knives or planting seeds, made these activities seem less daunting to try at their own sites.

Fun Food Fitness Fridays will continue in August and September, then will probably resume in January 2015. If you are a family child care provider who is interested in participating, please contact Amy Portello Nelson at anelson@childrenscouncil.org.

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