Curriculum in Action - The Food Trust

Bonnie Hallam, The Food Trust

The Food Trust has incorporated the Loving Your Family, Feeding Their Future materials into its comprehensive school-wide programming through Eat.Right.Now in Philadelphia and our Distance School Program in a variety of ways. As a parent programming kick-off activity this year, we provided Loving Your Family handouts at Back to School Nights with an emphasis on Family Meals. Parents were given a Family Meals handout with recipes along with information about the benefits of veggies as they tested a variety of fresh vegetables. These Loving Your Family handouts were well-received by parents at this event and educators noticed that parents were particularly pleased with the recipes. Since the LYF program follows so nicely with our themes for the year, we have decided to give out a “Seven Healthy Habits” handout on a bi-monthly basis. During November and December, parents are receiving the Vary Your Veggie handouts at Report Card Conference “Veggielicious” tables. Since their children will participate in a vegetable taste test in schools during these months, parents are being encouraged to follow up by using some of the vegetable planning materials and recipes provided by the LYF program.

In addition to these bi-monthly literature disseminations at parent tables, we are also running parent workshops using the materials. To date, we have had two of these sessions (with a third planned for November 30). Our educators used the Vegetables and Fruits: Simple Solutions lesson for this workshop. Approximately forty-eight parents attended these two sessions and the feedback we got from them on our evaluation forms as well as the observation of the educators delivering the workshops indicates that parents felt the sessions were very valuable. Here are a few quotes from our educators’ summary of the events:

“Many participants said that they had not eaten any vegetables the day before, which led nicely into a discussion of the barriers/challenges to eating vegetables (and, to a lesser extent, eating fruit). We then brainstormed some easy ways to add more vegetables to our diets (i.e. snacking on carrots, having a side salad at dinner, adding chopped vegetables to tomato sauce, etc.) and to kids' diets. At the end of the session, parents asked for additional handouts to share with friends.”

The participation by the parents was wonderful! They actually started brainstorming amongst themselves about strategies for getting their children to eat more diverse veggies. It was exciting to see and hear how they were planning to involve their children in the meal process.

Both educators reported that the teacher/home and school representative that they worked with in each school were thrilled with the parent turnout and participation and asked if we could do more sessions. We are in the process of planning additional workshops for these two schools as well as working with some of our other educators who are interested in doing these workshops in other schools.

As far as challenges, some of our schools have large Spanish-speaking populations. Although the materials are available in Spanish, which is very helpful, working through an interpreter to deliver the lessons can be difficult. In addition, the program does not provide evaluation material for the sessions. As such, we put together our own materials in both English and Spanish.

Another challenge was that only some of the colored/glossy materials are offered for free while others are available in a black and white downloadable form. It would be great to have all the material in a bright, glossy version as it is easier to read and more appealing to the eye. It would also be less costly for us since we have to pay to get the downloadables copied and we are trying to reach many parents in many schools.

For more information on both on both the Eat Smart, Live Strong and Loving Your Family, Feeding Their Future curriculums please see the Nutrition Education Materials section of the FNS website: http://foodstamp.nal.usda.gov/