Sensory Food Education - building a lifelong love of healthy foods through Sensory Weaning from SMSMAN's blog

Thinking of ways to fill the day with your baby is not always easy. Some days fly by and it's lunchtime before you realise you’ve not yet had that cup of tea you made 2 hours ago. Yet other days really seem to drag, and you struggle to find ways to keep both of you occupied in any meaningful way.

This blog will hopefully give you some practical advice and tips on how to support your child’s play at home and explain why simply ‘playing’ is a lot more developmentally beneficial than you might think.

Play is defined as a range of motivated activities done IKEA highchair accessories for pleasure.  It’s inherently enjoyable, and something that brings us pleasure makes us want to do more of it. The purpose of play is to make sense of the world.  Whilst playing, your baby is learning a multitude of things; building resilience; developing their motor skills; developing memory; cognitive skills; social and communication skills and building confidence in their opinions and their ability to make independent decisions.

Learning through play is an inevitable part of all children’s development - so harnessing this through the activities we do with them, to extend these learning opportunities, is a great way to support your baby as they grow.  This is called ‘scaffolding’ – and is the foundation of play-based learning.

Play based learning is based on scaffolding - where one concept builds on to another.  This is where adult assisted play is incredible for your baby’s development.  Adding words and language or helping extend one activity into another – is a fantastic way for you to build on your child’s natural desire to play and support the learning opportunity it provides.

Open ended play - where there is no end goal to the play – is of huge benefit to children in their early years. So instead of setting out a paint activity in a really structured way i.e. “We’re going to paint a picture of a dinosaur and talk about what we’re drawing” - try simply getting the paints out and letting them go wild. They might end up with a finger painting, or simply splodging and swirling paints onto paper– but there is still a learning opportunity in that. Instead of looking at your role as the leader, try looking at it as the guider. Instead of learning and directing play, children generally learn best when their play is self-directed and scaffolded. So that free-flow splodgy swirls of paint– what patterns can we see in it?  “Wow! Your red and blue colours mixed together, and you made a new colour – purple!  What happens when we mix yellow and blue?”   You’ve just delivered a science lesson without even trying, but most importantly – you’ve helped your child take the lead and you’ve been there to guide.

The best outcome for learning occurs where most of the activity with a child’s day is a mixture of:

• Child initiated play, actively supported by adults
• Focused learning with adults guiding the learning through playful, rich, experiential activities.

Almost all of us have worried at one time or another about the amount of fruit and vegetables our babies and toddlers are eating.  From those first tastes to more established weaning, and particularly when taking a baby-led or child-led approach to feeding, ensuring your little one eats a good balance of fruit and vegetables can be a worry.  

The Government recommends that all children eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day. However, recent research suggests that nearly a third of primary age children eat less than one portion of fruit and vegetables a day (Gov.UK) and that many pre-schoolers often have days where they eat no fruit or vegetables at all (Childfeedingguide.co.uk).

Fruit and vegetables are an essential part of a balanced diet and are important for providing protection against disease.  However, many babies and children show a dislike for vegetables in particular and make a beeline towards sweeter foods.  This natural bias is totally normal, and absolutely manageable (we’re here to help with that part!).  But it’s important to recognise that handing over control to your child on what to eat – when we see them choosing not to engage with the foods we know they should be (vegetables) - is one of the reasons many parents opt for combination or traditional weaning over child-led.

So how do you encourage your baby to choose the broccoli over the bread? The peas over the pasta? The carrots over the cheese?

The answer to this question is multi-faceted.  It’s a HUGE topic, and over the course of our blog series we’ll be delving into this topic to provide you with a tool kit of tips and techniques, knowledge and advice that will help you navigate your way through it with ease.

For now though, we’re going to start with the understanding that reluctance to eat certain foods is often related to an unfamiliarity with appearance, texture, or taste.  This understanding is so fundamental that it’s now made its way into the Department for Education’s EYFS curriculum under the topic of Sensory Food Education – a curriculum that encourages children to explore food using all their senses, to help them learn to love eating vegetables and fruit for life.