A varied and nutritionally balanced diet is essential to every child’s development and active participation during their time at nursery and at home. Children attending a full day at our nurseries will enjoy breakfast, morning and afternoon snack, a hot lunch with pudding and a light tea.
All our meals reflect seasonal local produce and are prepared daily with ingredients selected for their absolute freshness and quality. By always focusing on ‘fresh is best’, our fully trained Chefs do not use salt, pepper, sugar, colouring, artificial flavourings or additives to excite our children’s taste buds! Our Casterbridge Curriculum for our Chefs and kitchen staff, in addition to regular internal audits, ensures fantastic delicious meals which meet our strict health and hygiene policies and procedures.
Meals are served ‘family style’ where the children are encouraged to socialise with their friends and carers. Our Open Door policy means family members are always welcome to join us, especially during the summer months when we often enjoy dining ‘al fresco’ in our nursery gardens.
In addition to milk or water at meal times, drinking water is always available throughout the day. Our preschool children enjoy accessing their springwater dispensers while our toddlers develop their independence by choosing their own cups and our baby’s enjoy one to one care from their Key Person. This personalised approach ensures our staff support you and your baby when your baby develops from milk to pureed, finely chopped, chopped or normal foods. Our delicious meals and positive approach to meal times ensure any child’s eating habits are encouraged with patience, understanding and a lot of encouragement.
We celebrate and value diversity with exciting menu’s which reflect each individual child’s requirements (allergies, intolerances, religion and culture). Our families through the Parent Nursery Association and daily chats with their child’s Key Person support the nursery chef in planning and selecting recipes for their nursery menu.
Our commitment and approach to your child’s learning values their participation, experimentation and decision making. Therefore, cooking and tasting experiences where children regularly experiment with new textures, colours and smells as they mix, pour and measure ingredients form part of our early childhood curriculum.
Our chef, Allison Gardner, has put together a 4 week sample menu. She ensures our children receive a varied healthy diet with fresh ingredients.
