wide eyed: playing with your food

Monday, June 10, 2013

playing with your food

This semester at work I have been doing a LOT of food play. There are some small people at work who are very reluctant eaters - they have trouble being in the same room or at the table where food is, they have a very limited range of foods they will eat (a couple of students just have milk/formula as their main nutrition), and different tastes and textures really overload their sensory systems. Part of their goals at school include eating a wider variety of foods, and that's where I come in. With food play.

My goal is to have a calm learning space and whittle away at some of the sensory barriers these kids have around food. The teacher and I introduce a carefully selected range of tastes and textures, and we explore the food - what does it look like, smell like, feel like, taste like.... We put the foods straight on the table as we found that trays inevitably ended up on the floor upside down. It's really not as messy as it sounds. But I have to remember not to wear white on food play days.

It has been amazing what the kids have started doing all by themselves when we have taken away the pressure around food. When the main aim is calmness and self exploration they are really stepping up. We do lots of modelling of how to taste and eat the food, but we don't force any of the kids to do it.

On student has tried tasting foods he has never put in his mouth before, one student has expanded out his range that he will bite, one student has started touching foods in the clean up time (there is a set up and clean up time for each session to give a beginning and an end), and one student has stopped lying on the floor and screaming when food is around. This is all exciting, and when I look back at how far we have come over the last five months, I am excited to see where they will go by Christmas!

These photos are from some food play I did with a relative a couple of years ago - exploring different textures with the same colour food making a car, exploring different colours with the same shape food while making a tower, and a dinosaur swamp exploring different tastes with the same consistency.