Good Nutrition for Good Growth – Children’s Growth Awareness Day 2019

For our children to remain healthy and strong and live long lives, we as adults need to help them develop good eating habits.

During our last week of Term 3, the Foundation Stage classes covered the topic of ‘Healthy Living’. The discussions were about: what it means to be healthy and what can we do to live healthy lives?

We spoke about how we could make changes to our lifestyle to help us maintain a healthy life, and we came up with a few ideas:
• Be physically active
• Protect yourself from too much sun
• Eat a variety of healthy foods, and limit sugar and fat

We looked at the food pyramid and reminded ourselves what the most important groups were to help us maintain our healthy lifestyles. Which groups were we allowed more of and which groups were to be limited within our diets? Carbohydrates/ the grain group were the important foods, like pasta, bread, potatoes and cereals, however, we noted that brown bread was far better than white bread.

We realized the best way to eat a nutritious meal is to eat a little bit from each food group every day. The students had to take the food out of their lunchboxes and place it in the correct food group, namely fruit/vegetable group, milk group, meat group and grain/carbohydrates group. They all did an awesome job and found all of the food groups in their lunchboxes.

With the busy lives we all have today, it can be a rather daunting task to pack a lunch box for school everyday and hope that it is healthy enough but also appealing at the same time. For our children to remain healthy and strong and live long lives, we as adults need to help them develop good eating habits. Good Nutrition = Good Growth

Written by Martie van Dyk (Reception Teacher)

For more information on Children’s Growth Awareness Day and Child Growth Foundation please visit: https://childgrowthfoundation.org/gad/