FREE food literacy program for ACT early childhood education and care services!
Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are ideally placed to increase children's awareness, interest, and enjoyment of healthy food by helping improve children's familiarity with such food through play and learning experiences.
Nourishing Little Minds (NLM) in Early Childhood supports ECEC services to strengthen healthy food and drink culture and build positive eating behaviours in children attending early childhood settings.
Aligning with the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) and the National Quality Standards (NQS), the NLM program is designed to empower children to become confident food explorers, while building healthy habits for life.
Participating ECEC services will receive:
- Two hour on-site professional development session for educators delivered by our experts in child nutrition.
- NLM Educator Manual featuring purpose-designed activities, songs, recipes, parent resources and a detailed guide linking each aspect to the EYLF outcomes to assist in programming.
- NLM resource kit comprising of a suite of selected storybooks and templates to equip educators with tools to embed healthy educational activities into daily programming. Click here to view our list of storybooks.

Participation in this program involves completion of surveys at pre- and post-program, and three-month follow-up, for program evaluation and research purposes. Ethical aspects of this program have been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Canberra (approval number: 20214713)
Supported by the ACT Government under the ACT Healthy Canberra Grants program