Promoting healthy eating, active play and sustainability consciousness in early childhood curricula: Addressing the Ben10 (Trademark) problem.

Pre-school teachers to develop a curriculum intervention that integrates content knowledge about healthy eating, active play and sustainability consciousness. Each teacher’s curriculum intervention will be workshopped to ensure they have included the following components: 1) implementing the interventions over a period of 3-4 weeks to build a solid portfolio of experiences and strong base for children’s discussions; 2) implementing the interventions in the morning when the children are most cognitively alert; 3) combining both whole group and small group experiences and discussions; 4) using ‘real world’ props/resources, such as cereal boxes, McDonald’s Happy Meal (Trademark) boxes and toys and merchandise; and 5) maintaining assessment records of children’s learning using Learning Stories, observation and documentation. Teachers will be provided with an ‘Intervention Implementation Checklist’ and asked to record all components/elements associated with their curriculum interventions including: date, time, and duration of the intervention; the number of times the intervention or iterations of the intervention were implemented; Early Years Learning Framework Learning Outcomes aligned with the intervention; complete description of the intervention (including any resources/props used) and examples of any approaches to assessing children’s learning used in relation to the intervention. A booster session of 1 day duration, will be conducted 6 weeks after teachers implement their curriculum interventions whereby children will be exposed to an abridged version of the intervention.