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Healthy
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Snack Time & Food Memories
Many memories center around food--the taste, sight, feel, touch, and sound of it, and when and where we ate it! You may have vivid childhood memories that are triggered when eating certain foods.
How many childhood memories of food do you have? What about the smell of a turkey cooking? Does the sound of popcorn popping bring back thoughts of your favorite movie? Remember your joy at seeing gelatin jiggle and wiggle and the thrill of kneading bread dough or mixing meatloaf? And what about the delight of the first lick of an ice cream cone?
Young children today may experience events with food that become food memories as they grow older. How do you make snack time a memorable occasion for the children in your care?
Snack Time
Most programs offer children snacks to make sure they have enough energy to get through the morning or afternoon. When time is limited, some caregivers may simply open up a box of crackers, pour some juice and call it a snack. But snack time can be a time to practice social skills, develop motor skills, and learn. Think about the goals you have for providing children with snacks. The childcare setting offers ripe opportunities to create snack times that are memorable for both children and adults.
Many programs use snack time to teach children about food preparation. Snack time is a great time to get children involved and help them understand issues such a nutrition and food safety. Try out new foods during snack time. As you may already know, it takes more than one or two tries for some children to taste a new food, let alone swallow it.
In fact, you need to get a new food on the taste buds 18 times before a child truly decided if he likes the food or not! This is especially true for vegetables. Because children should not be forced to eat all of their food, they can refuse novel tastes and textures without worrying about displeasing adults and in time may come to enjoy the new foods.
This also is a time when many caregivers allow children to help with preparations, which tends to result in a better attitude toward trying new foods. Trying new foods, as well as allowing children to bring snacks from home, can help children learn about new cultures and appreciate how different families can be. Follow your center’s policies on bringing foods from home to make sure that, for example, that a peanut butter and cracker snack does not get shared with a child who has a peanut allergy.
Snack time also provides social opportunities with a time to relax and share. Pick a theme for snack time--like favorite colors, or people in your family--and go around the room so that each child can contribute.
Snacks can be used to teach about mathematics, art, music, science, and language. Children can practice counting using crackers or napkins, and can learn colors by talking about the different colors in food.
Finally, snack time allows you to make certain that you are meeting the child’s nutrition and energy needs by selecting foods and beverages that complement your regular meals.
Choose a Snack Time Activity
If you use an educational plan or have curriculum themes, design your snack time memory to match that plan. An obvious example is serving foods related to a specific holiday. You can be even more creative. If you are doing a geography lesson, serve foods from the countries you are studying. When working on language arts, teach the children the names of foods in different languages. If you are exploring nature, talk about the different parts of edible plants and serve examples of these to the children. While discussing different cultures, show how a single food (e.g. bread) may be cooked differently in various countries.
Consider what snack time memories you wish for the children in your care. Do you want it to be a picture of juice and crackers? Would it be more fun if you had the children help prepare or watch you prepare their snack?
Choosing Snack Time Foods
If your program provides meals and snack time food, then make sure children get a variety of foods throughout their day. Plan the meals first, and then select snacks that will complement your meal menus and the daily activity. The Child and Adult Food Care Program Guide or the Children’s Food Guide Pyramid can be helpful for choosing foods and determining amounts to serve.
Look at your own schedule for the day. On very busy days, you may choose to serve prepared snack foods and drinks. On less hectic days, plan snacks that the children can help prepare. If you are going on a field trip, plan easy-to-carry snacks that require no refrigeration. This could be juice and cracker day!
Childcare Snack ListFor each snack time, choose foods from the childcare snack list. Make certain that only one of these selections is a liquid and that children have water to drink at all times. Food Components Ages 1-5
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Snack Time Recipes
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Madeleine Sigman-Grant
PhD, RD, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension, Las Vegas, NV
Resources
Food and Nutrition Information Center, National Agricultural Library, 10301 Baltimore Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705-2351; 301-504-5719; www.nal.usda.gov/childcare/Recipes/index.html
Internet resources
Illinois Early Learning Project, www.illinoisearlylearning.org/tipsheets/healthysnacks.htm
National Network for Child Care, www.nncc.org/Nutrition/cc42_snacks.presc.html
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