Nutrition is essential to help fuel your child's development. Our influence as a child care provider is very important in teaching children about nutrition and how to make healthy choices. Helping children become aware of what their body needs and how to energize their bodies in a healthy way will empower them to take care of their well-being. Growing healthy bodies and minds will give them the best chance of succeeding in anything they put their minds to.
Solids
At Skills For Life Child Care, we serve fresh, healthy, delicious, child-friendly meals & snacks throughout the day. We supply food that meets the Canada Food Guide standards.
We also go above and beyond in trying to support your little one's immune systems. We try our hardest in helping maintain healthy happy tummies by offering least one probiotics & prebiotic food every day.
We also do our best to stay away from processed foods and a big portion of our meals/snacks are make from scratch in daycare. When it comes to picking out our grain products, we always reach for whole grains. Our menus are seasonally based on taking advantage of fresh local sourced ingredients. We encourage the children to eat a variety of foods but are sensitive to individual food preferences and cultural preferences.
When searching for something sweet for our recipes, we avoid “Free Sugars” and look for naturally occurring sugars. Our favorite sweet things are bananas, apples, berries, and if we need something a little sweeter we’ll use a little raw, unfiltered honey.
Liquids
Children have free access to water all day! Skills For Life provides Avent Natural Drinking Cups, and they are placed on the counter where children can help themselves at any time.
If juice is offered, it is served with 100% fruit juice and only 1/2 cup no more than once a day. Children love to make what we call "Monster Juice." We make this treat with fresh fruits & Vegetables. Sometimes we even turn our "Monster Juice" into popsicles to beat the heat! Other popsicles children love are yogurt or Kefir popsicles. The kids love experimenting with different vegetables like beets, carrots, and even spinach to get funky looking frozen treats or a good laugh.
Skills for life provides homogenized cow milk (3.25% M.F.) for anyone over the age of one. We do not provide any Infant or toddler formulas because of the many different varieties and sensitivities. Parents are more than welcome to bring an unopened package of formula for daycare providers, and we are more than happy to do the preparation. If parents provide breast milk, please bring it daily and the appropriate temperature for the time when needed.
Table Etiquette
Set up- Big kids love to bring their own chairs, utensils & their water cups.
Practicing hand-eye co-ordination-trying to hold their spoons, forks, and cups the right way.
Stick strategy-We teach the children how to still have fun with their food without making a big mess. We give them their own toppings to mix in to create food they love.
Table Manners-how to use polite words
Conversation-how to start a conversation, how to show friends we care, how to choose the right joke for meal time, things we like, things we don’t like, talk about our weekends or the night before or where ever the conversation takes us...
Patience - waiting for our friends to finish before everyone heads to the potty line to wash up
Clearing the table - Big kids love to bring the plates to the dishwasher when they're on their way to the potty line. Some days they even have the opportunity to help put their dishes in the dishwasher. Usually, someone will offer to help with bringing all the waters back to the counter.
Then it's time to go potty, wash up, brush their teeth and settle down for story time.
To keep their experience positive, no child will be forced to eat at any time. We will only encourage children to try a little bite to see if they might like it or to help us better understand what they didn't like about the meal. Mealtime is a great time to help teach children how to express their likes and dislikes.
Canada Food Guide