Food Explorers: a class for picky eaters to learn how to enjoy new foods in order to become more adventurous eaters and less anxious during mealtimes.

Eating is a multi-sensory experience that can be very difficult for children with oral motor delays or sensory processing difficulties. Before a child can be expected to eat a variety of healthy foods, they must learn how to manage different textures, tastes, and smells. Once a child learns how to eat, they can begin to eat healthier foods that support learning and engagement in the world around them.

Class is based upon principals of the the Sequential-Oral-Sensory (SOS) approach. This developmental feeding therapy approach allows children to interact with food in a playful, non-stressful way. It aims to improve a child’s repertoire of foods through the exploration of different sensory properties including the color, shape, texture, smell, and taste. The SOS approach follows a systematic hierarchy to feeding, from tolerating foods in the room, interacting with foods, smelling, touching, tasting and eventually eating the food. While this class is built upon the foundation of feeding therapy principals, it does not intend to replace feeding therapy, which often requires individualized support.

Food Explorers Group

Food Explorers is a play-based feeding group for toddlers and young children who have a limited or rigid diet of decreased variety of foods. This small group (maximum of 5 children) provides opportunities to interact with nutrient dense foods in a gentle and inviting way through play with the additional benefit of peer modeling. Using principles of the SOS (Sequential Oral Sensory) Approach to Feeding, Andria has developed a program that focuses on fun ways to achieve repeated exposures and promote the exploration of new foods. Playing with food takes away the pressure or expectation of eating, and gives a child more freedom to explore on their terms in a non-stressful way. Over time, this process leads to increased tolerance of a variety of textures, smells, and tastes.

Taking age and developmental levels into account, Andria incorporates her health coaching background to teach about the specific nutritional benefits of targeted foods (e.g. carrots help our eyes to see, broccoli helps us to fight germs to keep us strong and healthy). When children understand the power of fruits and vegetables, exploring them becomes a meaningful and purposeful experience. Discussions are positive and focus on eliminating comparison of foods as healthy vs. unhealthy/junk food to encourage a positive relationship with non-preferred foods and mealtime routines. Learning new ways to objectively describe sensory properties of foods (e.g. crunchy, spicy, gooey, bitter, etc.) is another key component of this group that aims to decrease negative language (ie. "EW!" "Gross!" "I HATE vegetables!") relating to certain foods.

This 6 week series is unique and tailored to the needs and food preferences of individual group members as much as possible.

Organic, fresh produce is provided each week and will be cleaned and prepared before the start of each group meeting.