About the Play With Your Food Program
The Play With Your Food program includes three main program components:
Bi-weekly school-based fruit and vegetable exposure education sessions
Monthly newsletters to families
Nutrition education training for teachers
School-Based Fruit and Vegetable Exposure Sessions
Play With Your Food will offer bi-weekly fruit and vegetable exposure activities during students’ lunchtimes. This will include sensory activities to assist students in becoming more comfortable with a variety of fruits and vegetables. These sessions will be based on the Play With Your Food curriculum designed and distributed by the program planners. Each session will be a minimum of 15 minutes in length. Each session may be broken into several lunch periods depending on the individual school’s schedule; however, the combined sessions will include the entirety of the student body present at school on those days. Each session will be led by a Play With Your Food representative or a school staff member trained in the program.
Monthly Newsletter to Families
The Play With Your Food program will include a monthly newsletter to families with fruit and vegetable exposure activities and recipes to incorporate fruits and vegetables into meals and snacks. Family newsletters must be sent home in print or provided on an easy-to-access website with notifications to parents about where to find them. Newsletters will be created and distributed by Play With Your Food; however, individual schools may add to the newsletters as needed to address the unique needs and interests of their school community. Newsletters will be provided in both English and Spanish. No less than nine newsletters will be published per school year, and they will be available to all students’ households.
Teacher Training
The Play With Your Food program will train teachers and staff to incorporate nutrition education into their existing curriculum. Teachers and administrators will participate in a Play With Your Food training during a professional development day before the start of the school year. During this training, teachers will receive and review the provided nutrition education curriculum and discuss ways to include it in their existing lesson plans, including math, science, reading, writing, art, and physical education. A Play With Your Food program representative or a Play With Your Food-trained teacher or administrator will conduct this training. All teachers and staff will receive this training and will also have access to student exposure activity plans and the monthly family newsletter.
