CONTACTS: Erik Anderson, (208) 885-6358, [email protected],Laurel Branen, (208) 885-6789, [email protected];Janice Fletcher, (208) 885-7321, [email protected]; orBill Loftus, (208) 885-7694, [email protected]
By Satellite, Internet and Classroom, UI Offers Class on Feeding Young Children
MOSCOW, Idaho -- A team of University of Idaho child development, nutrition and education specialists have retooled a popular class, "Feeding Young Children in Group Settings," to freshen it and adapt it to the Internet.
A series of four satellite broadcasts will beam the information to audiences of childcare providers, educators and others beginning Sept. 21 in weekly installments. The free series is geared to feeding children from the toddler stage through age 5.
The course is oriented towards people who work with children in group settings. The principles outlined in the class are just as important at home, too. Parents of young children could also use information from the programs to help them choose a childcare center.
"If families are looking at a center to decide if it is a quality place for their children, we really recommend that they look at the mealtime. They should look at how the meal is offered, what is offered and what the adults are doing," said Janice Fletcher, a professor of family and consumer sciences.
The course was first offered by a satellite broadcast or by videotape in 1994 and attracted 7,000 viewers. In the six years since, the videotapes still generate a steady stream of comments from the audience.
Head Start programs throughout the nation offer the series as part of the staff training required by federal funding. Privately operated childcare centers also use the video-based course for training.
"It's not just childcare operators who use it, child enrichment programs also use it for training their staffs," said Laurel Branen, an associate professor of family and consumer sciences.
The continuing interest in the old series convinced them to regroup from the last effort and revise the original program to update some of the information.
The third member of the team, Erik Anderson, a UI associate extension professor of agricultural information, helped bring the course into the Internet Age by adapting it to the World Wide Web in addition to overseeing video production.
The trio found that one of the best ways to convey information was to use vignettes of young children eating. The first time around, they questioned whether all the travel and expense involved in videotaping children in group settings was worth it, Branen said.
No longer. The film clips or vignettes have proven very popular and effective in conveying why it is important for child care providers to use certain practices.
Branen offered the short film of "Raisin Girl" as an example. In it, a young girl is confronted with a piece of raisin bread. Instead of rejecting it because she doesn't like raisins, she meticulously picks away all of the bread and dunks the pieces in milk before eating them.
"By the time she gets done, all that's left is a pile of raisins in front of her. It's about giving the children enough time and then allowing them to eat their food the way they want to eat it," Branen said.
The vignettes are all new in the retooled course. "They're great learning tools. They cost us hundreds of hours in time but they're probably the most valuable part of the course," Branen added.
"We teach people to look at those so they can learn from the children," Fletcher added.
That's not to say that the children set all the rules at mealtime.
The first broadcast in the series will focus on the six principles for feeding young children in group settings. They include:
o Adults should eat with children
o Adults choose what is served and how it is served
o Children choose how much to eat
o Children need a variety of foods
o Children should serve themselves
o Adults set the feeding environment
The course is offered by the University of Idaho's School of Family and Consumer Sciences in the College of Agriculture and may be taken for academic credit for a fee.
Information about the broadcast schedule and materials developed to support the class are available at http://www.aee.uidaho.edu/feeding/ on the Internet. Most materials can be printed from the website. Participants can also register over the web.
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