How to Encourage Healthy Start in your Centre

Here are some tips to help make everyone a part of Healthy Start!

1. Give staff a weekly HOP activity to try.  Choose an activity, photocopy it or put it in page protectors, and post it in the preschool area.  Ask educators to try the activity a few times that week.  Afterwards, ask them to rate the activity:  How hard was it to set up?  Did the children enjoy it?

2. Make recipe pages for parents to borrow.  Put a recipe children like on a page, ask children to draw the dish.  Then, laminate the page and create a lending library for parents.

3. Laminate and share the LEAP Parent Cards.  Encourage parents to borrow the books suggested from the library!

4. Make homemade books.  Use pictures of the children playing some HOP games and add them to your classroom library.  Then, when children are reading the books, they remember how much fun they had being active!

5. Ask the children to plan a meal.  Go through Food Flair and find some recipes to make up a snack or lunch.  Then, ask the children to help prepare the food.  See pp. 88-82 in Food Flair for ways children as young as two can help out with food prep!

6. Share the monthly Healthy Start newsletter.  Forward our email to parents, print out copies and hand them out as children are picked up in the evening, or add a Healthy Start section to your centre’s newsletter and use one of our articles.

7. Make time for Healthy Start at staff meetings.  Just 5 minutes at every staff meeting can help keep the idea of Healthy Start fresh in everyone’s minds.  Contact the Healthy Start team for ideas about what to talk about during this time.

BE ACTIVE

EAT WELL

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