Blog: Southwark school serving up breakfast of champions
Kicking off with their breakfast club, healthy leaps forward have been made towards making their menu more balanced and ensuring pupils have a great start to their day.
The existing breakfast club offered mostly a choice of bread options like croissants, crumpets, toast and bagels. Working closely with the dedicated team, we added more fruit and dairy options to the menu. With a small equipment grant provided by Impact on Urban Health, Charles Dickens will also introduce hot breakfast items like scrambled eggs and porridge as well as cheese & cucumber wraps, to add more variety to pupils’ diets.
Each week the team encourages children to taste new foods, with a ‘Breakfast Club Champion’ certificate awarded to pupils who try some of the new options. SFM project officers have been really pleased to see a pupil who stated she ‘won’t eat fruit!’ tasting a grape one week, and a strawberry the next!
The breakfast club lead, Ms.Nash, has commented on how adaptable children of all ages have been; ‘It has been amazing how the children have adapted to the fruit and yoghurt. From the very young to the older children, it has proved very successful. Now that we have all our equipment, we will be trying out eggs and other healthy options and hope that these will be just as popular. I must admit I thought the children would miss their usual breakfasts but they have adapted very well.’
The children agree. One Breakfast Club Attendee in year 2 said: ‘There is so much more variety now. I love the fruit and eat grapes, mango or orange every day now’
Charles Dickens Primary School’s hard work is soon to go beyond the breakfast club as the Healthy Zones team will be supporting the school to review all of their food offerings over the next academic year.