﻿Hi, my name is Anele and I'm one of the occupational therapists. Today's lesson is all about being fussy with food. Or it's more when we struggle to eat when people on the table are quite noisy. Because we're focusing on the auditory sense, we will be looking at some strategies that will help you cope when people are noisy eaters. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. We will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. Each lesson will have ideas and activities that can be carried out at home or in school. This information is to be used alongside any specific strategies or resources which have been given by your child's school or therapist. If you have any questions or would like help tailoring this to your child's needs, then please contact your local therapy service. In today's lesson, we're going to focus on our auditory sense or our listening sense, and what that means when we are eating meals. So first of all, what you're going to get ready, is I want you to get a snack that you really enjoy to eat. Because when I'm speaking about food, I am always hungry, so I always find it helpful to have something to snack on. You're also going to need some pens and pencils and paper. So let's do our first activity together. Pause the video here to complete your task. And what you're going to do is once you've got all your pens, pens and paper ready, you're going to draw your favourite meal and I want you to speak to your parent or your carer and just have a chat with them about the sounds that your favourite meal may make is it crunchy meal, is it a gooey meal, is it quite a soft meal with very little sound? Just have a chat about that of all the sounds that you may hear and maybe share with your, your parent, what you know your parent or your carer what their favourite meal may look like. Once you've done that, please press play and we'll carry on with the lesson. Brilliant, well done. Our ears tell us about our chewing especially. And in some crunchy, I think some worlds this would be a really crunchy food treat. But it's really not for me. I don't know about you, but I don't like to eat bugs. So for you, it may be that your ears can be quite sensitive. When you're sitting at a table and there's a meal going on and people are eating. It may be that the conversation at the table is too many sounds to process. Or it could actually be the chewing that's involved, that can be annoying to you. And that can really distract us from enjoying our food. So here's a couple of things that we can do to try and help with that. We know that it can be tricky to eat new foods, especially when we not sure what they tastes like, sound like or look like. They can also be difficult when we eating with other people. And you feel that the table is really noisy. So one of the things that you can do is to maybe listen to some calm music in the background, something that you've chosen, which will distract you and distraction is probably the number one strategy when your ears are oversensitive to sounds, because the one thing we can't do, is we can't switch off our ears. And that's a really tricky thing to do. So when we can we can distract our ears by listening to something that we enjoy. So if you can tolerate having some music in the background and that's calmer for you, then that's a good strategy. And the other thing that you could do, is to play a little game something like Scrabble or you know that you can play alongside your meal. That can also help to distract you from the sounds that you're hearing. But, um, you know, some people find that headphones work. And the thing with headphones is it will emphasise your own chewing. And if you're really sensitive to that chewing noise, it may actually make it harder. So you try headphones, if it works for you, that's brilliant, but you may find that not wearing headphones on the table is actually an easier thing. Thank you for joining today's lesson. Finally, talk to your parent or carer and think about what can you do today to tolerate eating with others and little bit eat better. Have a great day.

Difficulties associated with accepting new foods

In this lesson, we will explore difficulties associated with accepting new foods Resources provided by University of Gloucestershire (CC BY-NC-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0)

Lesson overview:Fussy about food (Part 1)

Core Content

Equipment Required

Auditory Sense: