Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit*
Eat Well Play Hard in Child Care Settings (EWPHCCS) is a direct education and PSE change intervention that focuses on improving the nutrition and physical activity behaviors of pre-school age children and their parents/caregivers by using educational strategies and skill building activities to promote healthy behavior change. The intervention also builds social support within the child care environment by including teachers and care providers in lessons and encouraging positive role-modeling and classroom reinforcement of nutrition and physical activity messages.
The EWPHCCS curriculum contains 10 lesson plans tailored for preschoolers and 10 complementary lessons for their parents/caretakers. The lessons are about nutrition, cooking, mealtime behavior, and increasing physical activity among children. Activities, food preparation demonstrations, recipes, and take-home materials reinforce the learning objectives for each lesson.
All materials needed to implement Eat Well Play Hard in Child Care Settings are available free of charge by emailing CACFP@health.ny.gov.
The intervention materials include:
- Complete Curriculum
- Training modules for child care center staff
- Parent Newsletters in Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish.
- Pilot Tested
Center TRT developed an evaluation logic model and evaluation plan for Eat Well Play Hard in Child Care Settings, an intervention delivered through child care settings with the goal of influencing children’s at-home behaviors. The logic model is intended to guide the evaluation process; the evaluation plan focuses on the extent of implementation, acceptability, and effectiveness of the EWPHCCS program. This evaluation plan is intended to be used in combination with the template, which details the process of implementing EWPHCCS, and the Center TRT evaluation logic model, both posted on the Center TRT website. The evaluation is a pre-post design with no comparison group. The evaluation plan provides guidance on evaluation questions and types and sources of data for both process and outcome evaluation.
The New York State EWPHCCS program developed data collection tools that were used in program evaluation prior to the 2011 formal evaluation study. The Parent baseline– and follow-up survey includes questions about milk consumption, how often fruits, vegetables, and milk are offered, TV viewing and physical activity patterns of children, and confidence in their ability to perform healthy lifestyle behaviors. Additional evaluation tools are posted on the Center TRT website.
* SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designed and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.