Nourishing Little Minds in Childcare

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.

How can my service get involved?

Early childhood services located in the ACT can access this FREE program until 30 June 2022.

If your early childhood service would like to take part, complete the expression of interest form and we will be in touch to arrange a date and time for your centre-wide professional development session.

This project will provide insights on how food-based experiences can be a useful strategy in influencing children’s eating behaviour. It will also help to inform future research and program development in effective ways at exposing children to new and healthy foods through our partnership with the University of Canberra.

This study has been approved by Human Research Ethics Committee of the University of Canberra. The Approval number is 20214713

Supported by the ACT Government under the ACT Healthy Canberra Grants program

ACT Nutrition Support Service