Meals and Snacks
At Unique Day Nursery, we consider meal times to be the perfect opportunity to develop social skills and independence. We encourage our children to participate with serving their meals, setting the table and clearing the table once they have finished eating.
Children are supplied with three main meals and snacks throughout the day. All meals and snacks are prepared by our on site cook, and are planned to provide children with a varied, well balanced diet.
Nutritional Needs
We understand that good nutrition is important for babies and young children who are rapidly growing and developing. Eating healthily supports positive levels of concentration and cognitive skills and also sets lifelong eating habits.
We believe that it is important for children to develop a positive relationship with food from an early age. This can be achieved by encouraging healthy eating habits and ensuring that children associate food and mealtimes with feeling safety and comfortable.
We recognise that children require a nutritious, balanced diet, with age appropriate portion sizes and opportunities to explore new tastes and textures.
At Unique Day Nursery, we work closely with families to ensure that meals and routines around eating, cater to your child's developmental stage, support your child's feeding needs as well as their dietary requirements.
Allergies and Dietary Requirements
During the application process, parents/carers are required to provide details of any special dietary requirements and/or allergies. We will then cater for the needs of individual children accordingly.
We also implement a ‘traffic light’ system with regards to our lunchtime system. This means that:
- children with allergies will be provided with a red plate
- children with dietary requirements (i.e. Halal, non-beef diet, gluten free etc) will be provided with a yellow plate and
- children who do not have any specific requirements will be provided with a green plate.
This will ensure that children’s meals are not cross contaminated, thereby adhering to health and safety policies.