Meals and Snacks – Meals and snacks must be scheduled carefully and their timing must be based entirely on the needs of the children in the learning community.  Infants and Babies must be fed when they are hungry.  Toddlers and Twos may need to have a snack earlier in the day than 3s, 4s, and 5s.  Young children should not be asked to sit at the table for periods of time longer than their attention spans (one minute per year of age) without having something entertaining or stimulating to keep them seated. 

Talk with your Mouth Full – Many teachers read to children during dining. If this works for you, do it. I prefer a meal time filled with casual real conversation. Meal times are excellent times for talking about the activities of the day – not as a formal test/review/question time, but a casual discussion with conversation that leads to reinforcement of the learning.  “Wasn’t that funny when the water splashed out of the science table today? How did that happen?”

A snack time of 10 to fifteen minutes and a meal time of up to 25 minutes is appropriate for children from three to five years of age if there is adult participation, conversation, and learning happening.  A very wise Pre-K teacher, Christy Kearney, taught me this: As children get ready for Big School, where the rules are more rigid and the experience of eating in the large cafeteria can be truly overwhelming, try to ‘immunize’ against this ‘cafeteriaphobia’ by building skills of independence. Ask the children to open their own food packages and help their classmates. Play games like “Quiet Lunch” (and my favorite, “Glue Your Bottom”) to help the children stay seated longer. Have all the things the children need at the table to be independent – blunt-tip scissors for opening pre-packaged food, napkins, extra juice straws, and utensils – so they are not constantly requesting assistance or jumping up from the table to get things.

The more they do, the better their self-esteem. The better their self-esteem, the more they learn. The more they learn, the smarter they become and BOOM, your job is done and you can eat your kale and quinoa in peace.

Dining Room Rules – The obvious purposes of eating together in the preschool setting are to create community, practice good nutrition and to learn about good nutrition, but there is a great deal more to Breakfast, Lunch, or Snack Time than just eating. The basic rules on meals are:

• There must NEVER be forced feeding, NEVER be a sign of disrespect for family food choices, and food must NEVER be used as reward or punishment. 
• If parents are responsible for providing food, teachers MUST NOT make judgements about food choices nor should they make decisions about the order in which the food provided is eaten.  Letting the children make decisions about their food is one way to build intelligence skills and self-esteem. 
• Teachers must model table manners, eat nutritiously, and ALWAYS SIT DOWN to eat with the children. 
• Meals and snack times should never be rushed (and water should always be available throughout the day).

Next Blog: Routine Elements – Transitions