Daisy Lane Early Learning acknowledges the Turrbal and Yuggera/Jagera peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the lands and waters of Drewvale and south Brisbane. We pay our deep respect to Elders past, present, and emerging, and acknowledge their enduring connection to Country, culture, and community — and to the food traditions of this land that stretch back thousands of generations.
There is a particular magic that fills our centre in May.
It begins, as most beautiful mornings at Daisy Lane do, with the sound of a singing bowl — that gentle, resonant tone that calls our children into stillness and presence at the start of each day. But in May, something else has arrived alongside it: the unmistakable, deeply comforting smell that drifts from our kitchen as our in-house chef begins the day's cooking.
It smells like pumpkin soup. Like roasted sweet potato. Like something warming and nourishing and exactly right for a cool autumn Brisbane morning. It smells, in short, like the season.
At Daisy Lane Early Learning in Drewvale, our kitchen is not a place that happens separately from our learning program. It is one of our richest learning environments. And in autumn — as Brisbane's subtropical south settles into its beautiful, cool, dry-season rhythm — that kitchen becomes the heart of our Cool Weather Cooking program: a celebration of seasonal food, hands-on learning, and the extraordinary educational power of a child who is genuinely, deliciously, involved in what they eat.
Why Cooking Is One of the Most Complete Learning Experiences in Early Childhood
Ask any early childhood educator what activity brings together the most developmental domains simultaneously, and cooking — genuine cooking, with real ingredients and real sensory experience and real outcomes — is almost always near the top of the list.
In a single cooking experience, a young child can engage all five Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) V2.0 learning outcomes, multiple strands of mathematics, science, language, cultural education, emotional regulation, fine motor development, and — perhaps most importantly — a growing sense of their own capability and contribution.
The Queensland Department of Education's health and hygiene framework notes that early childhood services play a vital role in promoting healthy eating through educational programs and daily routines. The National Quality Standard asks services to promote healthy eating (Quality Area 2.1.3), and the EYLF asks children to take increasing responsibility for their own health and physical wellbeing (Outcome 3.2). Cooking with children is the most natural, powerful, and joyful way to do both.
When a child washes vegetables, measures ingredients, stirs a pot, and eventually sits down to eat something they helped create — they are not simply following a recipe. They are becoming someone who knows and values food. And that knowledge, grounded in real experience, lasts a lifetime.
The Daisy Lane Difference: Our In-House Chef as Learning Partner
At Daisy Lane Early Learning, our in-house chef is one of the most important people in our learning community.
Every day, fresh, nutritious meals are prepared for our children — not from packets or pre-prepared servings, but from real ingredients, chopped and stirred and seasoned with genuine care. The smell of cooking is part of the rhythm of our day. Children notice it, comment on it, ask questions about it, and learn from it constantly.
But our chef's role goes beyond the kitchen counter. In our Cool Weather Cooking program, our chef is an intentional teaching partner — bringing their expertise, their warmth, and their genuine love of food into direct contact with the curious, capable young learners in our rooms.
Children at Daisy Lane participate in regular chef-led cooking sessions throughout the cool season, where they are not passive observers but active participants:
- Washing and preparing seasonal vegetables — developing fine motor skills, hygiene habits, and a hands-on understanding of where food comes from
- Measuring and pouring — building early mathematical understanding through the most motivated, real-world context imaginable
- Stirring, kneading, and mixing — developing upper body strength, bilateral coordination, and the particular satisfaction of transforming raw ingredients into something entirely new
- Tasting and describing — building vocabulary, sensory awareness, and a confident, curious relationship with food
- Serving and sharing — developing social skills, generosity, and the deep, warm experience of nourishing other people
Our chef makes this accessible across all ages. Even our youngest learners in the nursery can touch, smell, and explore ingredients in sensory baskets alongside their rooms' cooking activities. Toddlers can wash vegetables and tear herbs. Pre-kindergarten and kindy children take on more complex roles: peeling, measuring, mixing, and eventually serving.
Cool Season Cooking: What Brisbane's Autumn Brings to Our Kitchen
Brisbane's autumn and winter are among the most abundantly beautiful seasons for local produce. As the humidity of summer eases and temperatures drop into the comfortable 15–26°C range, the region's market gardens and farms come into their own — and the food on our tables changes in ways that are noticeable, meaningful, and delicious.
In our kitchen at Daisy Lane this cool season, our chef is working with:
🎃 Pumpkin — peak season from autumn through winter, rich in beta-carotene, vitamin A, and dietary fibre. Roasted, souped, mashed, and eaten in a dozen ways. Our children love pumpkin soup season — the colour, the sweetness, the satisfying warmth of a bowl on a cool morning.
🍠 Sweet Potato — another cool-season hero, naturally sweet, versatile, and packed with vitamins. We roast it, mash it, add it to patties. Children who have peeled a sweet potato — felt its weight, its waxiness, seen its vivid orange interior — have a relationship with this vegetable that a supermarket trip simply cannot create.
🥑 Avocado — reaching peak season in autumn across south-east Queensland, creamy and rich and endlessly useful. Our children learn to scoop, mash, and spread — building the fine motor skills that will later become writing.
🍋 Citrus — lemons, limes, and the first of the season's navel oranges — perfectly timed for the beginning of cold and flu season. Vitamin C-rich, bright and fragrant, and utterly engaging for young sensory scientists: the smell of a freshly cut lemon is one of the most instantly activating sensory experiences in our kitchen.
🥦 Brassicas — broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage — cool-season vegetables that most children have complicated feelings about, which is exactly why we cook with them. A child who has touched raw broccoli, helped cut it, watched it change colour in a pan, and tasted it in a context they helped create is significantly more likely to eat it than a child who simply encounters it on a plate.
🌿 Fresh herbs — rosemary, thyme, sage — all thriving in the cool, dry conditions of Brisbane's winter garden. Our children grow some of these in our natural playground spaces. Harvesting herbs you have grown yourself and using them to cook a meal you will eat is one of the most complete food education experiences there is.
Cooking as Mindful Practice: The Daisy Lane Way
At Daisy Lane Early Learning, we begin each day with a singing bowl — that resonant, calming tone that invites children into presence and stillness before the learning day begins. This mindfulness is not an add-on or a ritual for its own sake. It is an expression of our belief that the quality of attention a child brings to their experiences determines the richness of what they take from them.
Cooking, in our program, is a mindful practice in the same spirit.
We slow it down. We notice. We smell the ingredients before we add them. We listen to the sounds of cooking — the sizzle, the bubble, the crunch. We look at how colour changes when heat is applied. We feel the difference in texture between raw and cooked sweet potato, between whole and mashed pumpkin.
This is not performance wellness. This is attentive living — the practice of being fully present in what you are doing — and it is exactly the kind of engagement that makes learning deep and lasting rather than surface and forgotten.
When our children cook mindfully, they remember what they cooked. They talk about it at home. They ask their families to make it again. They develop a genuine, embodied relationship with food that no worksheet, no flashcard, and no lecture could ever create.
Cooking, Connection, and the Daisy Lane Family
Daisy Lane Early Learning is more than a centre. We are a community — a close-knit family where long-term educators, children, and families know and are known by each other. Many of our families are second-generation enrolments. Siblings and cousins continue the journey together. Our educators feel like family because, in many meaningful ways, they are.
Food is the language of family. It is how we show love, how we mark celebrations, how we carry culture across generations. When we cook with children at Daisy Lane, we do not cook in isolation — we cook in the context of family and community.
Our Cool Weather Cooking program actively invites family food traditions into our kitchen. We ask families to share recipes from their cultural heritage, and our chef brings these into our program with respect and enthusiasm. A soup that a grandmother makes in winter in another country becomes, through our kitchen, a bridge between a child's home life and their centre life — a taste that says: your family belongs here. Your food belongs here. You belong here.
This is what the Queensland Government's early childhood inclusion framework calls genuine belonging — and it is baked (quite literally) into everything we cook.
The Learning That Happens in Our Kitchen: What Parents Often Discover
Parents are sometimes surprised by how much their children talk about cooking at home after a cooking session at Daisy Lane. A child who barely speaks about their day will suddenly launch into a detailed account of how they made soup — what went in, what it smelled like, how they helped stir, what it tasted like at the end.
This is because cooking engages the whole child simultaneously, and whole-child experiences are the ones that stick.
Here is a summary of what is actually happening when your child cooks at Daisy Lane:
Mathematics: Counting, measuring, comparing quantities, understanding sequence ("first we add this, then we add that"), fractions at the most concrete level ("half of this orange").
Science: Physical and chemical change (how heat transforms food), classification (sorting vegetables by colour, shape, smell), prediction and observation ("what do you think will happen if we heat this?").
Language and Literacy: A cooking session generates more motivated, specific vocabulary than almost any other early childhood activity. Texture, flavour, temperature, process, method — the language of food is rich, precise, and memorable.
Social Development: Taking turns, sharing tasks, waiting patiently, contributing to a shared outcome, experiencing the joy of feeding other people.
Fine Motor Development: Peeling, tearing, pouring, stirring, spreading, rolling, cutting with child-safe knives — all developing the hand strength and dexterity that underpin writing and self-care.
Emotional Wellbeing: The pride of making something real and having it valued. The security of familiar smells and tastes. The warmth of doing something together. The delight of eating what you made.
As Children's Health Queensland's Healthy Kids program confirms, the early childhood years are the most formative time to build children's relationship with food — and positive, hands-on food experiences in these years create the foundation for a lifetime of healthy eating.
Cool Weather Cooking at Home: Seasonal Recipes for Drewvale Families
The best thing about seasonal cooking is that you can do it at home with minimal equipment and maximum joy. Here are some simple, child-friendly cool weather cooking ideas for Daisy Lane families this autumn:
🍜 Pumpkin soup together — Roast pumpkin wedges in the oven (your child can help brush them with olive oil). Once soft, scoop out the flesh and blend with warm stock and a pinch of nutmeg. Your child can help with almost every step. Serve with crusty bread. This is the taste of Brisbane autumn, and it is the taste of learning.
🥔 Mashed sweet potato — Peel, cube, boil, mash with a little butter and a pinch of cinnamon. Let your child do the mashing. It is one of the most satisfying actions in cooking, and the result is one of the most universally loved dishes a young child can make. Top with a face of raisins and peas for extra pride.
🥗 Rainbow salad — Ask your child to choose three different-coloured vegetables at the local shops. Come home and wash, chop (with appropriate supervision), and arrange them on a plate together. The Queensland Government encourages families to involve children in food selection and preparation as one of the most effective ways to support healthy eating habits — and a rainbow salad is as simple and as joyful as it gets.
🍋 Lemon and honey warm drink — On a cool Drewvale morning, squeeze half a lemon into a mug of warm water with a spoonful of local honey. Your child can do most of this themselves. It is warming, vitamin C-rich, and a gentle lesson in where flavour comes from.
🌿 Herb butter — Find rosemary or thyme at a farmers' market or garden shop. Let your child pull the leaves off the stem (this alone is a wonderful fine motor activity), chop them coarsely, and mix into soft butter. Spread on toast. This is real cooking, accomplished entirely by a child, and it is wonderful.
A Note on Frankie, Bluey, and Smokey
At Daisy Lane, our beloved animal friends — Frankie the Frog and our beautiful birds Bluey and Smokey — are part of our learning community and our understanding of the living world.
In our Cool Weather Cooking program, these relationships matter. Children who care for animals — who notice when Frankie is active or still, who understand that Bluey and Smokey need particular food in cooler weather — are children who are developing the attentiveness, empathy, and ecological awareness that underpins a healthy, thoughtful relationship with food and the living world.
We eat seasonally because seasons matter to living things. Frankie the Frog knows this. Our birds know this. And increasingly, so do our children.
EYLF and Cool Weather Cooking
Our seasonal cooking program connects across all five EYLF learning outcomes:
- Outcome 1 – Strong sense of identity: Successfully making food that others enjoy is one of the most affirming, identity-building experiences of early childhood.
- Outcome 2 – Connected to their world: Cooking with seasonal produce connects children to the rhythms of the natural world — and to the cultural food traditions of their families and community.
- Outcome 3 – Strong sense of wellbeing: Healthy eating, hands-on food experience, and the warmth of cooking together all directly support children's physical and emotional wellbeing.
- Outcome 4 – Confident and involved learners: Cooking is science, mathematics, and inquiry at their most concrete and motivating.
- Outcome 5 – Effective communicators: The language of food is rich, precise, and joyfully communicable. Children who cook have more to say.
Come and Cook With Us
At Daisy Lane Early Learning, every child deserves to feel safe, seen, and celebrated — and nowhere is this more true than in our kitchen, where every contribution matters, every palate is respected, and every meal shared together is a small celebration of this warm, close-knit community we have built together in Drewvale.
We would love to welcome your family to our table.
📍 4 Buckley Drive, Drewvale QLD 4116 📞 07 2802 5430 ✉️ enrolments@daisylaneearlylearning.com.au 🌐 daisylaneearlylearning.com.au 🕐 Open Monday – Friday, 6:30am – 6:00pm
Sources
The following Queensland-based and national sources were used in the research and writing of this blog post. No other early childhood or childcare services have been cited as sources.
- Queensland Department of Education – Health and Hygiene earlychildhood.qld.gov.au – Health and Hygiene — Queensland Government regulatory guidance on healthy eating and nutrition in early childhood services, including the requirement for services to have a healthy eating and nutrition policy and to promote healthy eating through educational programs.
- Queensland Government – Resources for Parents and Families qld.gov.au – Resources for Parents — Queensland Government guidance for families on supporting healthy eating through involving children in food selection, preparation, and seasonal food exploration at home.
- Queensland Department of Education – Inclusion Ready earlychildhood.qld.gov.au – Inclusion Ready — Queensland Government framework for early childhood inclusion, including the celebration of cultural diversity through food and the importance of every family feeling welcomed and valued in their early learning community.
- Children's Health Queensland – Healthy Kids Program childrens.health.qld.gov.au – Healthy Kids — A Queensland Government-coordinated professional development program for early childhood services, providing evidence-based guidance on children's nutrition, healthy eating habits, and the role of food education in early childhood wellbeing.
- Sunshine Coast Gallery (Sunshine Coast Council, QLD) – The Impact of Art on Children's Development gallery.sunshinecoast.qld.gov.au – The Impact of Art on Children's Development — A Queensland cultural institution providing evidence on how open-ended, hands-on creative experiences — including cooking — support cognitive, motor, sensory, and emotional development in young children.
- Queensland Government – Early Childhood Education qld.gov.au – Early Childhood — Queensland Government information on the EYLF V2.0, Queensland Kindergarten Learning Guidelines, and the role of food education, cooking experiences, and healthy eating in early childhood education across all five EYLF learning outcomes.
- Nature Play QLD – About Nature Play natureplayqld.org.au – About Nature Play — Queensland Government-supported research on the benefits of children's connection with the natural world, including growing food, caring for animals, and understanding seasonal rhythms as foundations for ecological awareness and wellbeing.
- Early Childhood Australia – Queensland Committee earlychildhoodaustralia.org.au – Queensland Branch — Queensland's peak advocacy body for early childhood education and care, providing research and resources on food education, nutrition, play-based learning, and best practice in early childhood settings.
Daisy Lane Early Learning is a warm, family-focused early learning centre in Drewvale, south Brisbane, where every child deserves to feel safe, seen, and celebrated. We are open Monday to Friday, 6:30am to 6:00pm, and care for children from nursery age through to kindergarten. Our in-house chef prepares fresh, nutritious meals daily. We acknowledge the Turrbal and Yuggera/Jagera peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the Country on which our centre stands, and we pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging. To enquire about enrolment, contact our friendly team today.
