Episode 148: A Community Program for Literacy and Nutrition

Husky Reads is one of the longest-running community impact programs for UConn Husky Nutrition & Sport out of the Neag School of Education here at UConn. Husky Reads is designed to promote nutrition and literacy among preschool children. The curriculum includes a series of 10 weekly lessons that introduce the preschool-age children to MyPlate while improving fruit and vegetable literacy. Our guest on this podcast is Sarah Larocque, who is the lead coordinator for Husky Reads, who explains the program to us. More than 800 preschoolers across Connecticut engage with Husky Reads each year at 15 early childhood education centers. Such sustained community partnerships are a hallmark of UConn Husky Nutrition & Sport as well as the University’s mission, values, and areas of focus in its current Strategic Plan.

Listen to Episode 148 on Podbeam

Mike: Well, hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of the UConn 360 Podcast. It’s Mike Enright from University of Communications, along with Izzy Harris from University Communications. Hello, Izzy. Welcome back.

Izzy: Oh, thanks Mike. I’m happy to be back in the chair.

Mike: You took a podcast off. You were busy.

Izzy: I know. As you say, I was on assignment,

Mike: on assignment.

Izzy: Not to put you on the spot here, but it sounds like you’ve already learned something new during our soundcheck.

Mike: What, what? What is that?

Izzy: About chia seeds.

Mike: We were told we were having a conversation with the guest about chia seeds and, and yeah, I don’t think I’ll get into chia seeds.

Izzy: Well, you never know. Maybe by the end of the episode you’ll be more inclined to

Mike: I don’t want to; I don’t want to Chia pet growing out of my stomach.

Izzy: I don’t think that’s how it works, but I’m sure our guest will be able to tell us a little bit more about that.

Mike: Sure. She will. Our guest we’re very excited to have is Sarah Larocque. She’s an educational program coordinator in Husky Nutrition Sport, and she’s the lead coordinator of Husky Reads. All of this is out of the Neag School of Education. Husky Reads is one of the longest, serving community programs we have here at UConn, and like I said, it’s out of the Neag School of Education. It’s designed to promote both nutrition and literacy among preschool children. The curriculum includes a series of 10 weekly lessons that introduce preschool aged children to fruit and vegetable literacy, and also includes reading at least one children’s book, an activity or a game and food tasting to complement the learning objectives.

More than 800 preschoolers across our state of Connecticut engage with Husky Reads each year. At 15 different locations and this type of community involvement is a cornerstone not only of Husky Reads and not only of the Neag School of Education but fits right into the strategic plan for the university. So, Sarah has both an undergraduate and graduate degree from UConn, and she’s a registered dietitian. Which is why we were talking about chia seeds.

Izzy: Correct.

Mike: So, Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Sarah: Thank you for having me.

Mike: So, give us a little overview of the Husky Reads program. I, I did a lot of facts and figures there but maybe you know, how it services children in our state. And what are some of the cities and towns that you work in?

Sarah: Yes. And I just want to say you did a wonderful job doing a lovely overview of Husky Reads.

Mike: Well, I hope so.

Sarah: Husky Reads really is a combination of early literacy skills, along with the foundation of nutrition and physical activity. So, we are working with preschoolers all over Connecticut. You know, just this year we’ve been to Hartford, East Hartford, Manchester, Wethersfield, and all the New London. So, we really do go all over the state. And we’re working again with preschoolers, right? So, we talk about MyPlate with them. We are not talking about, and the benefits of chia seeds with them necessarily. We’re keeping it a lot simpler. So, we are talking about MyPlate recognition. You know, one of our objectives, one of our goals is after a few weeks when we look at that MyPlate poster, they’re able to see it and recognize it and say. That’s MyPlate. You know, that’s a big deal for us.

Mike: And what is My, I don’t mean to interrupt. What is MyPlate?

Sarah: MyPlate has been used since 2011 from the government. It, it replaced the pyramid, the food pyramid. It’s a really wonderful sort of take-home advice for how we can eat. And the plate has different sections. Half of our plate are recommended to be fruits and vegetables. A quarter is a lean protein source. Another quarter is a grain where we encourage. Whole grains. And then that last section is for dairy. So, milk. Gotcha. Milk and yogurt. Yeah.

Izzy: Yeah. I remember seeing MyPlate in middle school, probably through college. I took a nutrition course there as well. And I kind of remember the switch from the pyramid to MyPlate when the government rolled out the new, I don’t know what word I’m looking for here. Plan. Yeah. Like the new plan, the new guidelines. Yes, yes, yes. The new guidelines. Thank you. Yes.

Sarah: That happened in the very first couple years of my career as a dietitian, and it made a lot more sense. I mean, as a dietitian, you couldn’t really look at the last iteration of the pyramid and give, take home advice. It, it was multicolored, hard to follow. MyPlate is really nice and efficient. Take home advice for how we can make better nutrition. Choices. I said that weirdly. That’s okay.

Izzy: Yeah, no, it’s very visual. Yes. You can see the exact guidelines in a circle and align your plate like that.

Sarah: Exactly. Or find ways to, to make changes to your plate. Right. Because it doesn’t always look like that. So how do we get it to look like that?

Izzy: This sounds like a really great program for both the children you work with, but also for the UConn students involved with the program. Can you tell us a little bit more about how UConn students come into play with this?

Sarah: Yes. So, they really run it. We have the curriculum established. We have, it’s been a nationally established curriculum in the 30 years that we’ve been running it, but the UConn students run it. So, Husky Reads is a two-credit course. It’s cross listed between EDLR, which is Educational Leadership and Nutritional Sciences.

But it’s, there’s no prerequisites. You do not have to be a nutrition major or early or pre-education major, but that’s often students that are interested. And they are running the curriculum. So, we do the training, we go over everything, we provide the supplies, but they are going into the classrooms each week and delivering the lesson.

Mike: So, it seems like the program combines two really important things, healthy eating and reading, how do those things interact in the program and how do you achieve getting results in both those areas?

Sarah: So, it, that’s a really great question. I think for us, I’m part of UConn Husky Nutrition and Sport, and we do nutrition and physical activity education in everything that we do. We know that literacy is so important, and early literacy is so important. I mean, think of when you were in school. The majority of our curriculum is reading, so there might be different ways or different strategies to teach reading. We are just very simply going in there and bringing joy. We’re combining both literacy and nutrition and, and physical activity with joy. So, we have themes every week centered around that MyPlate, right?

An example is grains make us go. So, when we are talking about the grain section, we have a book about a mother hen and her chicks learning how to make bread and their friends helping or actually in the book not quite helping them make the bread. So, we are going through the book. We are doing letter recognition. We are asking the kids, hey, what do you think’s going to happen next? Do you think that the hen is feeling frustrated, her friends aren’t helping? Do we share when we are working together with our friends? So, we do those kind of things. Again, very simple because we’re working with preschoolers and then we go more into grains. We have an activity that week where we call it the grain train. And so, every time we hold up a picture, we ask them if it’s a grain or not. And if it’s a grain, they move, because grains help us go. And then at the end we have a snack that’s related to that theme that week. It is a whole grain cereal that’s very popular with the kids. Some weeks we have to really bring the joy at snacks because they might not, some, some kids might not feel as joyful with the snack that we’re bringing, but that’s an easy week.

Izzy: You’re getting really creative with the way that you express food to these young children. I, I love that grains make us go because it’s true. That’s, that’s what gives us our energy. Exactly. But I’m sure it’s not always easy working with younger um, children, what inspires you to work with them? Why did, why did you choose that age group?

Sarah: That’s such a great question. The first 10 years of my career, I primarily worked with adults and then I had my own kids. So, I have a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old. And when my 7-year-old was born, I realized I as a dietitian really don’t know much about how to feed. Kids and when they’re ready. So, I started learning more and just became really interested in working with kids and I found it so fun and rewarding. And also, as we all know, there’s so much misinformation and disinformation out there. It’s confusing. So, to be able to help parents better feed their kids or answer questions or, or debunk some of the myths are, is really. Helpful for me. So, before I was here at UConn, I worked in birth to three, which is early intervention. So, kids when they’re first born to two years old and it was answering a lot of those questions and supporting the parents and caregivers for how to best feed their kids or just giving them, just answering those questions sometimes so it feels less stressful because it can be very stressful.

Mike: So, it seems like Husky Reads is one of those programs for the university I kind of call them front Porch programs that exposes people to the university that may not normally know about UConn. It’s in, in a, you know, it’s not taking a class, but it’s, it’s just like the UConn extension or. Or the Benton or athletics, or the dairy bar. They, they, they, they find out about UConn through this program. Talk about how, how the program kind of fits the, the overall umbrella of the, of the mission of the university.

Sarah: Yeah. So, we are a service-learning program, right? It’s experiential learning. So, it allows the UConn students to get an experience that maybe they otherwise wouldn’t, right? They’re not in a class. Getting a lecture, they’re getting hands on experience, and it provides us that opportunity to go into the communities. I mean, we have been at Husky Reads. We have been working in the community for 30 years. Some of our partners we’ve worked with are over 20 years, so they, they know us, they recognize us when they come in. We have that relationship that’s with them, and we know that we’re in their space and we’re there. To make sure that we are supporting them, having fun, being respectful and collaborating with them. So, it is just this really nice experience both for the community and for us, the campus, that community, campus relationship, partnership.

Izzy: You mentioned some of the partners that you work with, are you looking for any new partners? How would someone reach out if they want to get involved?

Sarah: Always. Yeah. So, we are always looking for new partnerships. And you know, one thing that I think we’ve discussed before is how are we going to, if we are going to expand Husky Reads in any way, I, I think something that we’ve always toyed with are we typically in the semester go to three different sites. Could we go to more. And so, in a semester, typically we have six students enrolled on a, on a given day, a Tuesday or Wednesday, or a Thursday. It’s Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday mornings. So, for college students getting up at 8:30 feels like a bit like a commitment, but for those preschoolers, they’ve already, and the teachers, they’ve already lived a whole day and it’s really helpful to get the lesson in before lunch and before nap time. So, we ideally with six students, we can divide them into teams and get in about six classrooms. So that is something to think about with preschools. We always think about, you know, can we at least cover two to three classrooms for ideally two to three students to run the lesson?

So, it really is that Husky Reads lesson is a lot of teamwork. It’s in smaller teams, the UConn students are running it and they’re getting comfortable dividing. Tasks and making sure that they’re staying in about a 30-minute timeframe for the lesson. So that’s a very long-winded way to say you know, the, the size of the preschool can be one thing. We traditionally have been Snap Ed funded. So, a lot of times when we are. Working with preschools, there is a percentage of the participants that receive the snap, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly known as Food Stamps Benefits. There have been changes to funding. So that is something that we have to explore more in the future, but that has become, that, that in the past was something that we’d be looking at as well. Sort of like the, the, if people receive a percentage of people that receive SNAP benefits.

Mike: So, it sounds like this is a great program for everybody involved yourself, the UConn students, the preschool students. Is it fun to be part of?

Sarah: It’s so much fun and I tell that to the UConn students, you know, because I think sometimes, we can get so wrapped up in making sure that we’re staying on time and that we’re, we’re doing everything in the curriculum. But I tell them, the preschool students remember how much fun we’re having. That’s what they remember, right? We’re hoping that they can name a fruit or two. We’re hoping that we can find a way to interact with them to try a snack if they’re hesitant about it, but they remember the joy that we’re bringing and the fun that we’re having. And those preschool kids are so excited to see us week after week. They’re such a great group to work with, a great age group, and the UConn students, it’s so cool to see how excited they get when they establish these connections with the kids. We’re there for 10 weeks. And so, they’ll say, oh, did you see he tried the snack today? Or, oh, he remembered my name, or he remembered my plate. So, there is just so much fun that happens week after week. And I think with the UConn students, when you are so busy in your courses and you have so many responsibilities, it is a longer period of time that you know they’re going to and from. We do provide transportation there, but I think even though the, it’s an extended period that they’re off campus, it just is a way for them to have fun and to regroup and to kind of recenter. And they usually walk out each week being like, oh, that, that was just so much fun.

Izzy: It really is amazing. I just wrapped up a project on Feel Your Best Self. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it or not, but basically, it’s a program integrating puppets with different emotion coping strategies into elementary schools, high school, middle school. That was a little out of order, but that’s okay. But anyway, the most fun part about it was going and getting to be with the kids and you know when they’re at that age and you can feel the impact of teaching them something that they’re going to take away and bring home and have with them for life. It’s such a valuable concept to be able to experience.

Sarah: It really is. I mean, I was calling last year one of our partner sites to set up to see if they were interested in us coming back again. And the woman that answered the phone was like. I went to this preschool, and I remember, I remember you all being there, right? So, they don’t necessarily remember every part of what we’re saying, but they remember the impact, and they remember like the, just the fun that we’re there to have with them.

Mike: Well, Sarah, it sounds like this program is just a, a terrific way, helping UConn students, helping the preschool students and, and just making a real impact in various communities across Connecticut. And we thank you for stopping by the podcast today.

Sarah: Thank you for having me,

Mike: Izzy. I’m off to buy chia seeds.

Izzy: All right, sounds good. I’ll meet you there.

Mike: Alright, I’ll see you next time on the podcast.