Introduction

During the last few months, the nursery has made small changes to mealtimes, this project looks at why we wanted to change to make mealtimes a positive, understanding, and engaging experience. How all staff and children are involved in mealtimes from setting up to serving, eating, conversations and clearing up to make mealtimes a valuable and social part of our daily routine.

Context

As a new manager taking over the setting with 3–5-year-old children in the midst of a global pandemic there were many challenges. We observed that due to Covid 19 our mealtimes had become very routine like with staff organising and serving all meals. Through staff discussions at meetings, we felt staff and children were missing out on the social skills and interactions that happen with each other at mealtimes both at nursery and home.

“I feel we rush the children while eating and don’t engage with them, just so we can get it over with and tidy up” – Staff Comment

Using Froebel’s Principles, realising the ambition, and setting the table as well as The Care inspectorate bite sized videos, we had already started to think about how we could change. We thought about different ways of setting up the room and giving the children the freedom to become aware of their own learning by organising, serving, eating, and clearing away meals to provide rich real-life experiences for the children.

Working collaboratively with staff, children and parents was essential throughout this project. We looked at our policies and procedures and worked with the school kitchen around allergies and healthy eating procedures. We asked the children what they thought about mealtimes and how they would like them to be. We started a project book with the children that we plan to carry on and visit on a regular basis to allow the children to express their view and ideas as an ongoing project. In the book the children recorded their own ideas and thoughts, or the staff helped the younger children to scribe. We looked at pictures of tables and set ups, cafes and food dishes – the children cut out the ones they liked to stick them into their book.

Our setting is a smaller community term time nursery with 25 children and 5 staff. Mealtimes include breakfast and lunch. This project was carried out with the children and staff’s views being the heart of it to achieve a positive experience for all. Although all the children were involved in the experience, we focused on a small group of 5 and their keyworker. To gain this knowledge we carried out observations at breakfast and lunch times to see what was happening and working well or if there was anything we could change or enhance.

We asked all staff to take part in a short 5-question survey, where we asked for their views on mealtimes, the set-up, food, how they felt eating with the children and how they would like to see happen at mealtimes. All findings were shared with staff at meetings to discuss how we could move forward with improvements. We had discussions with the children and started a floor book with pictures, comments and their drawings around their ideas and thoughts.

At staff meetings we looked at Froebel’s principles and ideas to ensure we all had that shared Froebelian approach. Some staff did further training and research through the Froebel website.

Ethics

I discussed everything with the staff, then the children and the parents of the focus group. I explained everything to them. I explained to everyone that if they felt uncomfortable and didn’t want to join in, they didn’t have to. The staff were more than happy to participate, and the children loved the idea of getting to help run the project and make a floor book about the changes. I explained to the parents that photographic material would benefit my project and informed them of the forms to sign. They accepted with pleasure and told me that if it benefits their children to go ahead. This made me feel positive about this project and I was confident as there were no ethical restrictions.