Thursday, February 17, 2011

Food Book

Another food activity to get my little one to eat. This is from my fave new book....Just Take A Bite: Easy, Effective Answers to Food Aversions and Eating Challenges by Ernsperger and Stegen-Hanson. Let me just say this book is not for the typical picky toddler. This book is about severe food aversions for children with developmental disabities, autism, multiple food allergies or medical problems related to delayed eating.

One of the suggested activities is to make a journal about new foods. The idea is that each time J eats a new food, I take a picture of her and she gets to glue it into her food journal. I'll let her color and decorate the page with glitter as a kind of celebration to each new food consumed.

I put the 30-40 page book together with construction paper and string for the binding. I wonder how long it will take to fill this book with new food pictures. I'm not kidding myself...probably a very long time! But we've got time!


I printed out some pictures of J eating as a baby and toddler. Then I simply made little notes about each picture and the food J is eating.



I'm excited to have J show this book to grandparents and friends. It should become for her a book to brag about. It's good to celebrate successes in this way. Hopefully, we'll have successes, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

The idea of the food journal is not only as a brag book, but to increase a child's knowlege of food. We will probably talk about what is a fruit or vegetable, healthy choice or treat, textures and how things taste. The more knowledge children have about something that produces anxiety, the less anxiety they will feel. It's a way to become familiar with a scary thing like food.

There is another activity in the book I'm so excited about. It's how to make a spit bucket. Totally gross and ingenious! I'll work on that early next week.

1 comment:

  1. I'm liking the ideas Kate. Would you like to borrow our pop-up book called Chewy Gooey Rumble Plop? My boys learned a lot about digestion from it. It has pop up, moving models of the gut and what happens in the stomach.

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