Lunch time – DixitLAB

This document will relate about the lunch time in early childhood education, giving to this moment its full pedagogical value and highlighting its relevance to stay healthy and develop healthy food practices.

By remembering our practicum experiences in different schools, we all came to the same conclusion: in the lunch time, the children who we were attending, they all were watching all kinds of videos, like movies, songs, cartoons…, instead of talking and interacting with each other. According to Ritscher (2010), to promote the development of autonomy it is highly recommended to avoid such practices with the aim of “mislead” children, since these practices only feed the child but they do not promote the capacities of taste and sensation.

However, one of these three practicum experiences is quite opposite to the rest. In this specific case, children do interact with each other about what they were interested in, as well as they help each other, and the teacher would not silence the dialogues. This way the children could talk with the classmate sitting next to them but also with the whole group. To concrete these dialogues, we will give some examples. They would ask each other about their birthdays parties, who will assist to which party, they would also ask each other about what food preferences they had, they even help each other by opening the plastic packaging and last one but not least, they would also encourage to finish their food to the classmates that were always the last ones.

Talking about the types of food that were brought to the schools, we have compared some schools with others. In some schools, there was a weekly calendar in which day was programmed with different type of food (yogurt, cereals, fruit…) to promote a varied and balanced diet. In other schools it was free choice.

A common aspect that we have found in this weekly organization of the breakfast is that some families did not respect this weekly calendar and they did not offer to their children variety of healthy foods.

As Thió (2011) defends, children have to confront situations that develop their autonomy, with challenges that gradually develop it. However, this has not been like that in our practicum experiences in the schools, because teachers did the small achievements of the students themselves, like opening the wrappers or serving water in the glasses. It did not really promote the autonomy of the children. The teachers did it that way because they wanted to finish lunch time as soon as possible to do other activities.

In conclusion, we can affirm that it is not given enough pedagogical value to lunch time in the schools, because the objective is saving time and take advantage of it to do useful activities where lunch time is excluded.