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Messy Play


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Hi you wonderful people,

 

i thought i'd enquire whether you knew about this old policy of not playing with food, in messy play because of all the starving children in other places around the world?

 

It came up in a team meeting, that years ago, i do mean years that settings were not allowed to play with jelly/pasta/mash potato etc

 

According to the staff member who raised this, settings were asked to sign to say they wouldnt use food items to play with.

 

Can any of you shine a light on this?

 

Many thanks

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No, I have never been asked to sign any such 'agreement' (and I have been in EY for many, many years :blink: :1b ).......I do know however that some people do have a 'problem' with this.......

 

I do use foodstuffs for play - if me not doing so could help the people around the world who are short of food then I would stop immediately, but sadly it won't.......

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I think it's quite a tricky one. Yes, our not playing with food won't solve global hunger but I do find it quite difficult to say that we have so much food that we can play with it and throw it out when there are people who struggle to feed their families in this country let alone in areas of the world hit by famine, drought etc. There's no easy answer. I've never had a policy on this. If we do play with food at nursery we tend to use things that we can re-use such as lentils and pasta rather than jelly, mashed potatoes etc as it seems less wasteful. The other thing to consider is safety when playing with cooked food.

Beehive

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we do have food play - mash potato, cooked pasta, porridge, angel delight, etc etc - i dont think that allowing children to play with a litlle food every now and then could be considered wasteful -this is how small children learn about taste, texture, they can use all their sense to explore and discover , there are other ways of seeking to help the world food shortage -supermarket waste for example - and i would (shamefully) admit that my household probably throws away more food each week than i give to the children at my setting to play with.

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Good point Sunnyday! The only issue I know of is parents complaining that it teaches children to play with food

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(Young) children should play with food.... might help them not turn out to be such fussy eaters or so squeamish about getting messy or so reliant on parents to spoon feed them everything.... (sorry... me being all Bah humbug again :rolleyes: )

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Warming to the theme now (let me know when I'm getting boring! xD ) - unless you buy commercially produced play-dough then I presume you use flour to make it - is that somehow 'different'? (perhaps it is in a way as children may not see that as 'food'....hmmmm)

 

A month or so ago lots of us were busy making 'cloud dough'.......wonder how much flour we used between us! :blink: xD

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There is no policy to my knowledge that prevents settings from using food stuffs in children's play, it's one of those areas where staff should discuss the pros and cons on the basis of informed debate and decide for yourselves.

 

Whilst my conscience is occasionally pricked when we do have jelly, pasta, lentils, oats, where do you draw the line, no water, no playdough, no gloop?

 

I guess mud is free though....

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Thanks everyone. Sunnyday the waterplay and playdough clash is what i brought up too.

 

But i do think its something we are going to have to agree on as a team.

 

Although i think we all agree Mud is great and less wasteful!

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But some places don't have enough mud to grow crops! Just to add to the debate :blink:

I agree that children should be encouraged to explore food - after all it is likely to be their first experience of mark-making! The more familiar they are with food produced the less they are likely to waste in the future by not eating what is put in front of them (I have personal experience of this as I made purees for my 1st child and did baby-led weaning with by 2nd. My 2nd wastes SUCH A LOT LESS because he is so familiar with food, yet my first (who is now 5) will have to be seriously encouraged to try something that he hasn't seen before (yet he ate in a puree as a baby!).

I immediate response would be to say that we have bought it, we haven't taken it from someone else who was going to eat it, nor are we using so much that their isn't enough left for others to buy. As others have said, we waste more throwing away unused food from our cupboards and 'out-of-date' food from supermarkets which is still edible. Is it not just as wasteful to baked a cupcake or biscuit with the children that they don't actually need to eat? Just ideas that I'm throwing out?? Or should it be 'food for though?'

Green Hippo x

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Just a thought - but has anyone tried approaching supermarkets / producers to see if they would donate / sell you out of date goods for play?

Either that or ask parents to donate out of date products, we often use out of date food colouring / flour etc when making playdough...

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Another 'devils advocate' thought...........I think there is a great deal of difference in allowing a child to play with food that they are going to actually eat............and playing with food as a 'toy'. And water for water play could be collected in a water butt rather than from a tap? If we decide that it's ok to play with food on the basis that we've bought it, or that we throw out more than we play with, isn't that a double edged message to our children?? I do make playdough and I do have water play..............playdough is not made every week, unless I make long-lasting cooked dough ( we use clay, mud and plasticene). I can only square the water play in my mind because we are not in drought here, nor have we found a way to send water to other countries, though we can and do, support water aid charities. I don't use other foodstuffs to play with, absolutely because it feels wrong to me, but that's me.

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Just playing 'devil's advocate' really - we wouldn't say 'no water play' because some countries have no safe water to drink........

 

 

Hi sunnyday

 

actually this did make me smile a little as someone recently said to me that we should not play with water because of the conservation issues, interestingly they wanted us to use water butt

 

xx

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