Sintra Grows Healthy: development and implementation of a food literacy curriculum for primary schools

Abstract

Objective: Describe the process of development and implementation of Health at the Table - a food literacy curriculum for primary school aged children. Design: Through a community-based research process, Health at the table development and implementation took place in four stages: exploratory study, production, implementation, and monitoring. Setting: Primary schools of Sintra’s municipality, Portugal. Participants: Children (6 to 10 years), teachers, school staff and children’s legal guardians of three primary schools during the pilot project and eight primary schools in the second year. Results: During the needs assessment phase, 99.1% (n=341) of the children’s legal guardians, 100% (n=34) of the teachers and 100% (n=19) of the school staff considered that the school plays an important or very important role in children’s food literacy (stage 1). During the pilot project, a manual with 60 session plans was developed (stage 2). In the second year Health at the Table was implemented by 72 trained teachers during one school year (stage 3). Most of the teachers agreed that the curriculum was appropriate (69.2%) and that children developed health, wellness/well-being, and environmental skills (83.1%). Most of the children said they had learned about healthy eating (86.3%) and claimed to eat healthier since the Health at the Table implementation (58.9%) (stage 4). Conclusions: Health at the Table is a food literacy curriculum that can be reproduced in similar contexts in a sustainable way. The need to combine educational strategies with a healthy school food environment is reinforced to increase effectiveness in tackling childhood obesity.

Book clubs as strategy for increasing nutrition knowledge among general population

“…This landscape shows the need to encourage efforts to provide general public validated information about food and health, in a wider context than the concept of nutritional education through attractive formats for the population, such as the use of Information Technologies (Murga Eizagaechevarria, 2016) or food literacy as strategies to improve knowledge and skills to make healthy dietary choices (Vidgen & Gallegos, 2014). Despite the complexities around the concept of food literacy (Perry et al, 2017;Thomas et al, 2019) there is an increasing tendency for addressing it, for instance, designing high-school curricula with modules on agriculture, nutrition and cooking, including specific learning objectives and evidences of learning (Ruiz et al, 2021;Nogueira et al, 2022).…”