Food Play
Recently Melody has started food therapy by seeing an Occupational Therapist. When she first started solid food, she did fairly well. She would eat almost anything we offered her. However over the last few years she has become a lot more picky. She has started giving up foods she once ate often, and now she is becoming even more particular about the foods she does eat. So we finally gave in and started food therapy after her 4 year old well visit.
At our first visit with a dietician, OT, and speech therapist they did an analysis of her eating behaviors and such. One of their recommendations was food play. So we have been trying to do that as often as possible. Below are some of the things we have tried out so far.
One thing we did at food therapy because Melody is so anti touching “wet” things is pour items in ziploc bags. Melody won’t eat this yogurt anymore because the packaging changed (one of our many issues). So I squeezed the yogurt into the ziploc bag, then I let Melody pour sprinkles into the yogurt. I closed up the bag, then she could draw and play with it and not get dirty!
Another activity we did was placing sprinkles on a plate. I tried to get Melody to draw in the sprinkles, but she did not. Then I had her take water using a straw and put on the plate to see what it would do to the sprinkles. The last thing we did was take soaked cheerios and move them to the plate using chopsticks.
You can also take the cheerios (or Fruit Loops), and make words out of them.
And the most recent thing we did was take cookie cutters and cut shapes out of bread. She had a lot of fun with this one.
