6.5a Healthy Eating

At Hanney Pre-School, we regard snack and lunch times as an important part of the children’s day. Eating represents a social time for children and adults and helps children to learn about healthy eating. To help us comply with government initiatives and for the general well-being of the children, we adhere to the following guidelines:

For the lunch club sessions, children are expected to bring a balanced packed lunch with them

Procedures

We follow the procedures below to promote healthy eating at Hanney Pre-School.

Prior to a child attending Hanney pre school, we enquire about his/her medical, cultural and/or dietary needs – including any known allergies. This information is recorded on a registration form and signed by parents/carers. We ask that parents advise the pre school of any changes to their children’s dietary needs – including allergies.
To ensure continuity of care, we display current information about individual children’s dietary needs so that all staff and volunteers are fully informed about them.
We aim to ensure that children receive only food and drink that is consistent with their dietary needs and preferences as well as their parents wishes.
We take care not to provide foods containing nuts or nut products and are especially vigilant where we have a child who has a known allergy to nuts. To avoid the risk of a child with a known nut allergy being exposed to nuts during a lunch club session, we ask parents not to provide packed lunches that include nuts or nut products (e.g. snack bars, peanut butter, pesto).
In order to protect children with food allergies, we discourage children from sharing and swapping their food with one another.
Through discussion with parents and research reading by staff, we obtain information about the dietary rules of the religious groups to which children and their parents belong, of vegetarians, vegans and about food allergies and intolerances. We take account of this information in the provision of food and drinks.
We organise snack and lunch times so that they are social occasions in which children and staff participate.
We have fresh drinking water available for the children throughout each session. We inform the children about how to obtain the water and help them if necessary.
We inform parents of our policy on healthy eating.

A choice of fresh milk or water is supplied to drink.

Lunch Time

We ask parents to provide a healthy balanced lunch for their children.
Avoid including any kind of sweets and chocolate bars.
We suggest:

Sandwiches – small with children’s favourite fillings (excluding peanut based fillings)
Yoghurts
Small portion of crisps or savoury snacks
Fresh fruit/vegetables – we can chop or peel if necessary
Other suggestions:
- dried fruit, cold meats, pasta or rice salads, raw vegetables with dips, jellies, homemade cakes, jam tarts, tinned fruit

Please, NO NUTS of any kind!

Cooking & Special Cccasions

Special celebrations such as Pancake Day, multi-cultural festivals or sensory tasting activities in line with current themes may allow for small amounts of food to be tasted. Cooking activities will be a mixture of healthy foods or treats which we will use to discuss and then send home for parents to decide if their children are able to eat them.