Joanne Roach (00:13)
Hello and welcome to the Food for Kids podcast. I'm Joanne from the Foodies.
Today's episode is a quick roundup of 5 fun games that you can play with your child in order to build their familiarity with food. The idea is to help increase their confidence about the fact that there is no pressure to eat when they explore foods.
For all of these activities there will be opportunities for children and adults to taste foods but there are also alternatives for exploring the foods without tasting it for those children who might be more nervous.
These alternatives will use a framework that dieticians use called the 32 Steps to Eating, where children get to interact with food at different levels where they feel comfortable, from identifying it, touching it, describing it, smelling it and tasting it. So I'll run you through the games that you can do together and give alternatives for your child to do if they're not likely to want to taste the foods.
Even if they play the game without ever tasting a single food, they're still getting to explore the foods as well as see their parents or siblings tasting and exploring them. And that will reinforce the sense of security that we're trying to give them that they don't have to eat a food until they're ready and they want to. That exploring without tasting is valuable too in its own right and that they're not letting anybody down if they don't taste food. So here are some fun games that you can play together to expose your child to new foods.
So game number one is blind detectives and as you might guess from the title we're using blindfolds here to stop us being able to see a food so that we can explore it and have some fun. This is a game we've been playing in The Foodies and in schools for a really long time and it's a really good way to encourage children to explore foods without just using their eyes. Using a blindfold, children who are prepared to taste foods or adults can take tiny bites of different foods. We usually use five foods and a mixture of familiar and less familiar tastes is really good. Players can gain points for guessing foods correctly. And for children who don't want to taste the food, can still explore it with their fingers and they can also bring it to their nose and smell it. And if they want to, they can press it to their lips or touch it with their tongue.
If your child doesn't want to wear the blindfold because they're either nervous about that in principle or they're worried that someone's secretly going to make them try foods, then the adult can be the one being blindfolded and the child can then offer them the foods and decide which order to put them in. This still builds up their own familiarity and watching the adult explore it with their fingers, by smelling it, by describing it and then talking about the different attributes and guessing it, the children still get to explore the food vicariously and they get to handle the food themselves.
In our Little Foodies Club boxes we provide suggestions for five seasonal foods each time, some of which overlap to build up confidence. So over the course of a year children explore around 50 different foods but you can pick any foods you like. It really is a nice idea to include one that's a bit of a wild card and ones that you know that people are definitely going to get because they either have a strong smell or a weird texture or are very familiar. So that's blind detectives.
The most important thing must be no pressure. Children who do to have the on must not be put under any pressure to go further with exploring food than they want to and absolutely mustn't be expected to taste it unless they really want to but it's a really fun way to explore food and children really do enjoy watching somebody else exploring food with a blindfold. So that's number one.
The second one is Pass The Food Parcel
You need several people to play this because it's like the traditional pass the parcel game where you pass the parcel around and when the music stops whoever's holding the parcel then gets to do an action in this case you have a large bowl and you put a bunch of different foods in it, I would suggest somewhere in the region of 5 to 10, there should obviously be things that don't get messy when they're messed around together, but things like individual strawberries or grapes small pieces of cheese or chopped up carrots, just a selection of fruits or vegetables, can also put some sweets or some crackers in as well if you want to.
When the music stops, whoever's holding the bowl has to choose an item, take it out of the bowl, it, and then explore it. If they're happy to eat it, then obviously they can eat it. If they're not happy to eat it, they can just describe it, say what colour it is, they can rub their finger on it, they can smell it, or they can just talk about it in some way. If they don't eat it, should nevertheless take the food out of the bowl that somebody else doesn't end up eating a food that they've messed about. Carry on until the bowl is empty. Again the main thing is to make sure there's no pressure.
The third game can be done as a standalone game or can also be done at the table, at a meal where there's several elements on the plate or in middle of the table family style. It's a variation on the classic I Spy game but instead of naming the thing that the person is describing, you eat the thing that the person is describing. Or for a child that doesn't want to eat it, they can explore it or describe it clues can be varied according to the age of the child so if got several children at the table you can obviously have some more difficult clues and some easier clues and people can use more than one clue for the same food. For example, I spy something which is green, I spy something which is round like a ball, I spy something that grows in a pod, spy something which is a legume are all clues for a pea. If all the foods on the table are foods that people like to eat then obviously they can just eat the answer. But if children don't want to eat the answer they can still name the food, pick it up and show everybody that they've chosen the right one.
The fourth game is to make plate art. So this is a child led, fun amateur version of the kind of cool pictures that we see on Pinterest of people making fun art on a plate out of bits of food. So this is a really good opportunity If you've got some oddments of fruits and vegetables in the bottom of the fridge and maybe other snacky foods to go with it or even at a dinner time where there is a selection of small items on the table. Children get an empty plate and they can build a picture out of the items on the table. It helps if the adult has prepared them to be in lots of different shapes. So for example, if you've cut some carrots into sticks or some celery, if you've left some leafy things as full leaves, if there are some different sizes and shapes, for example there might be raisins to do things like eyes. Have a little think of some different shapes and sizes to enable children to build a picture. If you need some inspiration, go and have a look on Pinterest for some of the things that other people have built. But the most important thing here is that this should be child-led. There shouldn't necessarily be an end goal for it, and absolutely don't have to eat any of it. You will find that some children will be perfectly happy to eat some of it at the end, but there should be no pressure. So that's just a fun art activity.
And last game is Simon Says but with food. If you remember this game, everybody has to follow an instruction if it has Simon Says at the beginning and if it doesn't have Simon Says you're not supposed to follow it. This is a really fun one at the dinner table where all the foods on the table are safe foods or can modify it to make sure that some of the instructions don't involve eating. It's better if you're using something like snack foods or foods that can be eaten cold or if it's hot food you can just play a really short round. Examples of some of the instructions might be Simon says bite your cucumber, Simon says put your cheese on a cracker, drink some water haha I didn't say Simon said, Simon said, shake the dressing, Simon says make a smiley face in your mashed potato and so on. It's definitely advisable the first time you play this to do so when you know that all of the foods are relatively safe so that everybody is very calm about it and doesn't worry that they're going to get asked to do something they don't want. But over time if you've got used to playing this game every now and again you can occasionally add in a new food because your child will have built confidence that they might get asked to do something other than tasting.
So that's the five ideas, I hope one of them sounded like fun. For all of these ideas you can just use tiny amounts of each food. Exploring is the point of the game, you're not trying to fill anyone's tummies so you can either use food that they're already going to eat or can just be snacks, fruit and veg and bits and bobs that you've already got in the house.
Make sure you never ask the child to do anything beyond their confidence level. Always offer a range of exploring that they can do and still feel like a success. Make sure you take their age and stage into account. Use your knowledge and common sense of your child to be sensible about things like choking hazards and allergies and never allow young children to play any kind of tasting game without proper adult supervision.
Obviously these are just ideas, you can explore food without actually playing formal games. I've given you a bunch of other ideas for exploring food in previous episodes and there are loads more in my little mini workshop and in the little foodies club. But some people find it a bit easier to have an actual game with a structure, so these are some ideas for you.
That's it for now, on Monday I'll be back with another episode so I hope to see you then and in the meantime, happy eating!
0 comments