About Eat Move Learn

Fun ways to learn about healthy eating and keeping fit for 7–11 year olds.

Eat Move Learn logoWelcome to Eat Move Learn – our learning and activity resources for 7–11 year olds. Eat Move Learn teaches children about healthy eating and being active in a fun way.

We know that helping children get a healthy start in life is really important. By supporting children to eat healthily and get moving from an early age, we aim to help them develop healthy habits that could help reduce their risk of developing cancer and other diseases later in life.

What’s on Eat Move Learn?

We’ve created loads of resources that will allow children to become familiar with different fruit and vegetables, cooking terms and much more. There are also fun activities for you to enjoy with your children, such as:

Professor Clare Collins “Every effort to eat less food and drink that are energy-dense and nutrient-poor, and to increase consumption of vegetables and fruit for children will be worth it” – Prof Clare Collins, Laureate Professor in Nutrition and Dietetics

Recipes for children

Suitable for young cooks iconCooking from scratch is a great way to eat healthier food at home, and cooking from a young age helps to develop skills for life. It also helps to introduce and familiarise children with a wide variety of food – including lots of different fruit and vegetables.

Mixer, our Eat Move Learn cook, has lots of recipes that children can make with adult supervision. Look out for the recipes with Mixer’s picture or where it says Suitable for young cooks. These recipes use cooking methods suitable for children, have a shorter ingredients list, and make cooking fun. Safety is important, so supervision in the kitchen is still needed.

Download the PDF of each recipe for step-by-step instructions with photos at each stage to help children cook.

All the recipes we create are low in sugar, fat and salt. We also include lots of fruit and vegetables. Children have specific nutritional needs, and we help meet these in the following ways:

We avoid added sugar

Our recipes for children avoid added sugar, so sugar in the recipes will usually be naturally occurring sugars such as those in fruit, vegetables, yoghurt and milk. We’ve also kept a close eye on the amount of free sugars in each recipe. Free sugar is what we call any sugar added to a food or drink. It also includes the sugar that is already in honey, syrup, fruit juice, vegetable juice, smoothies, and fruit and vegetable purees. This is important because the amount and frequency of free sugars we consume can increase our risk of dental decay and excess weight gain.

We help towards 5 A DAY

Our recipes for children – including snacks and desserts – aim to have at least 1 portion of fruit or vegetables.

We don’t show nutritional information

On Mixer’s recipes, we only show how many portions of fruit or vegetables the recipe has. Other recipes also show calorie, fat, salt and sugar content. Rest assured, Mixer’s recipes still follow our nutritional guidelines, but we think it’s important not to recommend calorie-counting for children – that’s why we don’t show the number of calories per portion on Mixer’s recipes. Our recipes for children are not intended for weight loss purposes, and are instead centred on children being provided with healthy and nutrient-rich food.

We’ve checked the portion sizes

It can be really difficult to know how much a child should eat as it depends on age, sex, size and level of physical activity – and there are no UK government guidelines on this. While portion sizes for children vary, it’s still important not to feed children adult portion sizes. A 5 A DAY portion for a child is roughly the size of their hand. Every child is different and some will need larger portions than others of the same age, so it’s best to feed to appetite.

For our recipes for children, we’ve used the portion sizes recommended by the School Food Standards launched by the Department for Education.

For more on portion sizes, read child nutritionist Charlotte Stirling-Reed’s blog, Is your child eating the right amount?

The Eat Move Learn team (L–R) are: Mixer, Flower, Pedal and Searcher
Eat Move Learn