Fricchione Day Care Center

The Didactic Program in Dietetics (DPD) requires volunteer hours, and Marywood incorporates these hours into the curriculum through Supervised Practice opportunities. These rotations help students gain exposure to interprofessional work and specific areas of dietetics such as community and food service. The Fricchione Day Care Center invited us to teach a nutrition lesson to their 4 and 5-year-old class just before Halloween. I was assigned this rotation with two other students and together we developed an interactive lesson plan to present to the class. We knew that Marywood Nutrition Students have given nutrition-ed in the past and we wanted to be sure that the topics we discussed weren't repetitive. The majority of lessons that are presented to the students are based around MyPlate and general advice for healthy eating. Because we were so close to Halloween, we decided to go with a topic that related to the holiday and thought that it would be fun to incorporate new ways to eat healthy snacks. We first discussed pumpkins and the benefits that can be reaped from adding them to their favorite snacks like oatmeal, smoothies, and cookies. We briefly discussed the vitamins that a pumpkin contains and moved on to snack time. For the spooky snacks, I made "boonanas," clementine "pumpkins," and green "monster mouths." Needless to say, the kids loved this portion of the lesson. To tie up our lesson, we gave a hand-out that had a pumpkin chocolate chip recipe on the back so they can make a new healthy snack with their parents.