Food & Fun After School Curriculum

The goal of Food & Fun After School (© President and Fellows of Harvard College and YMCA of the USA) is to assist after school program staff in providing healthier environments to children during out-of-school time. The curriculum is designed to incorporate lessons and activities about healthy eating and physical activity into regular after school program schedules.

Food & Fun After School includes 11 teaching units that encourage healthy behaviors through active play, literacy and math skills development, creative learning, and hands-on snack-time activities.

With more than 70 activities to choose from and a user-friendly layout for each lesson, Food & Fun makes it simple to promote healthy eating and physical activity in your program every day.

Ten topic units offer a variety of games, learning activities, and recipes for after school settings. While some units reinforce others, each unit can stand alone.

Use all 10 units over the course of a school year, or use only a few. Some unit themes connect to a national month or other special events, as noted, which allows you to find other resources to support the messages in the units.

Unit 11 is an opportunity to review the key messages from Food & Fun, play a popular game or activity from a previous unit, and make your favorite recipes again. Try it out halfway through Food & Fun, or when you have finished all of the units.

The curriculum and program tools were created by the Prevention Research Center on Nutrition & Physical Activity at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health for educational use in after school programs serving children from kindergarten through fifth grade. Many of the activities and recipes can easily be modified for older children.