Welcome to Eat Like A Champ!

Eat Like A Champ (ELAC) is a healthy eating education programme for 9 and 10 year olds (Year 5 / Primary 6 / P6 pupils) run by Danone. With the help of street dance act Diversity, your child will finish this programme knowing a lot more about healthy eating and will be able to perform some great dance moves too!

We want to make the lessons as fun and exciting as possible – your involvement is key. If you can, please visit this website every week to find out what your child will be learning.

At the start of the ELAC programme, if your child’s school is participating your child will receive a passport. The passport contains 6 tasks for them to complete.  Please sign their passport each week and make a note of how they got on. Your child will be able to collect a sticker for each completed task.  The passport also contains information for you. You will be able to find out about what your child has been learning and pick up some great tips and ideas.

Lesson guides

We all have a part to play in helping educate children about what healthy eating is and how to apply it practically in everyday life. The Eat Like A Champ programme seeks to contribute to this positive movement by providing practical resources to parents, children and teachers.

Your child will be learning 6 different topics in class. The topics are represented in the form of steps to inspire children to climb all 6 steps, reach the top like Perri from Diversity and be eating like champs!

Click on the 6 topics on the left for an overview of what your child is going to be learning about. You will also find specially designed resources that are full of inspiration and ideas to help keep everyone healthy and active.

Eat Well

Your child has been learning about The eatwell plate, which is the UK healthy eating model. The plate shows the 5 different food groups:

  • Fruit and vegetables
  • Bread, rice, potatoes, pasta and other starchy foods
  • Milk and dairy foods
  • Meat, fish, eggs, beans and other non-dairy sources of protein
  • Foods and drinks high in fat and/or sugar. 

The eatwell plate shows the proportions of food we need from each food group – over a day or two.

Your child should bring home their ELAC passport from school, which contains all their Eat Like A Champ tasks. Your child’s homework this week is to record everything they eat for a day. Please help them by reminding them to fill it in after each meal or snack occasion. Remember to sign their passport when they have finished!

Look out for your free healthy eating wheel! The wheel contains lots of great tips relating to the 5 food groups. Your child should bring this home in the first week of the programme. 

Information for you:

Download useful information for lesson 1 (pdf)

Download health eating wheel (pdf)

INTERESTING FACT:

A third of your diet should be made up from fruit and vegetables.

5 A DAY

In this lesson your child will focus on the 5 a day message. They will be learning about the types of fruit and vegetables which count towards 5 a day, and how much is needed to count as a portion.

This week your child will have a 5 a day treasure hunt to complete. This will involve some interesting food discoveries!

Information for you:

5 a day recipes

INTERESTING FACT:

Often a lot of the fibre in fruit and veg is in the skin, so leave the peeler in the drawer when you can.

Nutrients and water

In this lesson your child will be introduced to the NutriDance group: Carbo, Mr Muscles, Fatman, Callie, Vic, H2O and Fibs. Together, they are unbeatable! They also represent the nutrients and other substances needed for good health. These are: carbohydrate, protein, fat, minerals, vitamins, water and fibre. 

In this lesson there will also be some focus on drinking. Our bodies are 60% water, so keeping that topped up by drinking plenty is really important. We should aim to drink 6-8 glasses of fluid a day.

Your child will be asked to record what they drink, and at what time, for 2 days.  Encourage them to drink 6-8 glasses every day. 

Information for you:

Hydration information and drink diary

INTERESTING FACT:

Children learn their drinking habits when they are young, so encourage them to drink regularly, especially when they are active or the weather is hot. Choose water, milk or juice, most of the time.

Healthy Lunches

This week your child will learn about the importance of eating regularly, and about healthy lunches.

Three meals per day is great, including a couple of snacks. Use The eatwell plate to help make sure you and your family eat a variety of foods in the proportions shown. Make sure you include a good portion of starchy food with every meal, e.g. bread, rice, potatoes, pasta. It’s also important to include fruit and/or veg with every meal.

To put this into practice, your child will be asked to design a healthy lunchbox for their favourite member of Diversity.

Information for you:

Healthy lunchbox ideas for the family

INTERESTING FACT:

People tend to eat more food when they eat while watching TV, probably because they don’t notice that they are getting full. It’s better to eat together without the TV so you can enjoy the taste of your food and notice when your body is telling you to stop eating.

Snack swaps

In the previous lesson your child focused on what makes a healthy lunch. This week they will learn about healthier snacks. There are lots of snack choices, so finding a few tasty alternative snacks could make a difference to your child’s health. To help, the class will be looking at the salt, fat and sugar content of different snacks and thinking about how they can make healthier snack choices.

Your child will be asked to make a snack which is suitable for their friends or family.  A ‘Fruit pot’ recipe is provided in their passport. Please help them with this project – perhaps in exchange for a taste!

Included in the passport are some additional snack ideas you could test on the family!

Information for you:

Healthy snack ideas and recipes

INTERESTING FACT:

Sweet foods as well as savoury foods can contain salt, so it’s always a good idea to check the label when you are buying foods.

Energy balance

This is the final lesson of the Eat Like A Champ programme. We hope you have enjoyed working with your child on the different tasks, and seen the results of their new healthy eating knowledge! This week your child will learn about energy balance. Energy balance means balancing energy in (food and drink) with energy out (being active) to maintain a healthy weight. Being active and eating a healthy balanced diet is the perfect way to keep your body running well.

Your child’s passport task this week will be to write a healthy eating pledge and an activity pledge. Please remind them about the pledges and encourage them at home to stick to them. You can help support your child with their pledge by planning some family activities.

We hope the Eat Like A Champ programme has been fun and inspiring for your child. We are interested in finding out your child’s as well as your own thoughts about it to help us improve the programme year on year. Please take 2 minutes to fill out the questionnaire at the back of the passport, or alternatively click here.

Information for you:

Get active

INTERESTING FACT:

Gram for gram fat has more than double the energy content (kilojoules/calories) than protein or carbohydrate so it’s easy to consume a lot of energy when you eat high-fat foods. It’s better to choose fatty foods less often and have small portions if you are trying to control your energy intake.