Role of Audio Visual Aids to Impart Garden-Based Nutrition Education for Preschoolers

Introduction: One of the most critical period in human life is the preschool years. In order to develop healthy food habits nutrition education need to be imparted at this age. There is a novel strategy to deliver nutrition education to children namely Garden-Based Nutrition Education (GBNE). Utilization of nutrition education tools can be an effective way for the delivery of GBNE.

Aim: To develop PowerPoint presentation on the importance of fruits and vegetables converts to video form and a child friendly gardening video for preschool children and assess the feasibility and acceptability.

Materials and Methods: Audio visual aids like power point presentation and videos were developed. Power point presentation on importance of fruits and vegetables was developed in such a way that it can reach the respondents and convey the intended message for preschool children with a total of 13 slides.

A documentary child friendly gardening video was constructed having a duration of nearly seven minutes with the title “Garden Based Nutrition Education” with the intention to inculcate gardening skills among children from their early childhood years. Both the tools were developed using standardized procedures and was subjected to pre study. In order to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the developed GBNE tools it was subjected to preschool teachers/anganwadi workers and parents of preschool children. The sample consisted of 75 parents and 75 preschool teachers which was randomly selected from Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram districts of Kerala.

Results: The study reveals that, both parents and teachers finds child friendly gardening video as the most feasible and acceptable tool to impart garden-based nutrition education.

Discussion: Preschool children loves gardening ad watering. Child friendly gardening video is most involving and interesting in nature when compared to power point video.

Conclusion: Therefore it can be concluded that power point video on importance of fruits and vegetables and child friendly gardening video can be used as effective GBNE tool to teach the significance of fruits and vegetables through gardening activities.