At Woodentops we believe it is important to learn to make healthy eating choices from a young age.

We make meal times a social and educational experience for the children.  They eat together around large tables as family groups.  This promotes good eating habits and table manners.  Our younger children watch older children feeding themselves and our older children learn to share and pass things around the table, with a real emphasis on good manners.  Staff join the children at the table, helping to feed the babies and talking to the older children about what’s on the menu that day.

For breakfast we serve a selection of porridge, muesli, cereal, yogurt, toast or fruit depending on the season. Our mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks are healthy and appetizing and designed to fill the gap between main meals.  They include fruit or crudité twice a day.  Our older children learn to help prepare their own snack and to serve themselves.

Lunch and supper are both substantive meals offering a varied and balanced diet, tailored to each child’s stage of weaning.

Our meals are prepared by a specialist nursery catering company who deliver freshly cooked hot food to us daily.  The menus are put together following the guidelines of the Caroline Walker Trust daily nutritional guidelines for under 5’s and represent a healthy, balanced, age appropriate diet.  The meals are micro-biologically tested by an accredited laboratory to monitor salt, sugar and fat content in the meals.  We display this nutritional chart (which uses the traffic light system) in our nurseries alongside the menus. Our suppliers source as much of their produce as locally as possible.

The menus rotate on a three weekly basis and change seasonally for summer and winter.  One of the highlights of the menu is the Around the World Day once every three weeks.  As part of this the children are introduced to food from different cultures.

Fresh drinking water is always available in the rooms and the children have their own named cups.  We provide cow’s milk at snack time for our older children.