Educating children about nutrition to form scientific eating habits

In tandem with learning and playing activities, preparing a solid foundation of nutritional knowledge to help children form scientific and healthy eating habits is considered the key to their comprehensive development. 
Many boarding primary schools have been educating pupils about nutritional knowledge through the "Three minutes to change awareness" Poster - a School Meal Project’s content. The Project has been implemented by the Ministry of Education and Training in collaboration with the National Institute of Nutrition - Ministry of Health and Ajinomoto Vietnam since 2012.
The poster provides basic nutritional information for a variety of foods about vitamins, minerals and their benefits. This information is illustrated in vivid images, making it easy for pupils to understand and remember.
 

Providing nutritional knowledge for children right from primary school helps them form scientific and healthy eating habits.

Before each lunchtime, pupils are introduced to the lunch menu, the foods included in each dish, nutritional information and benefits of each kind of food. For example, with the dish of braised tuna with tomatoes and pineapple, tomatoes contain a lot of vitamin A precursor to help children strengthen the immune system, prevent dry eyes and help keep the eyes bright, etc. From the poster, teachers can be flexible to organize interactive activities such as quizzes, games so that pupils can acquire knowledge better.
In order for schools to better implement the education of nutritional knowledge, the Project has been developing many videos with contents revolving around nutritional knowledge about food and other interesting and useful information. Through the videos, pupils can also learned some basic English words, enriching their foreign vocabulary.
 

The nutritional information and benefits of sweet potatoes introduced through the video.

The nutritional knowledge accumulated from the poster as well as daily videos helps children to eat a variety of food instead of just eating some favorite dishes made from familiar foods like eggs, pork, chicken, ...
The Project is also deploying to schools the “Nutrition-balanced Menus Development Software”. The software provides a menu bank of 120 menus with over 360 non-repeatable dishes for lunch. Those menus have been balanced in nutrition according to age needs, divided into regions of the North, Central and South. This is an effective tool to help schools standardize boarding menus, providing delicious and nutrition-balanced lunches for pupils.
Parents can watch the videos as well as learn about the Project's contents via this link or the Project’s information page.