That's a wrap

As children spend significant amounts of time in early childhood education and care services, these services provide ideal settings to promote appropriate healthy eating. Identifying different fruits and vegetables and their properties provides children with opportunities to explore and develop an interest in different foods, assisting in the development of life-long healthy eating habits. We believe that children don’t need a lot of complex, scientific facts about food. Children eat certain foods because they like them. Tasting foods over and over helps them learn to like a variety of healthy foods.

Instead of a regular sandwich option, we thought to switch up our lunches by making one small tweak - swapping out bread for wraps. Our children were excited by this new change, and we were still able to make a filling and nutritious lunch without any inconvenience.

This learning experience helps our children to:

+ Understand how to plan meals and choose healthy options

+ To be able to follow and modify a recipe

+ Identify healthy foods

+ Demonstrate food safety and hygiene

+ Build on autonomy skills by making their own lunch

For our wraps today we began by spreading egg free aioli and mashed avocado with a knife onto the bread. We then chopped our tomatoes, grated our carrots and arranged these onto our creations. We added a bit of lettuce, baby spinach and to finish, we shredded some chicken and salami (as a bit of a treat)

Our instructions were to:

+ Place your filling in a row

+ Fold in the sides and then firmly roll up from the top

+ As we continue to roll, spread some aioli along the bottom to secure it

As the children prepared their fillings, we explained that in order to have the wrap stay together we should spread the lower half of the wrap with aioli and avocado to assist with the wrap sticking together. As the children practiced their wrapping skills we encouraged them to press firmly to ensure the roll is tight and sealed. The challenging part was to hold the wrap still and not have the fillings drop as we took a bite.