Cooking offers many opportunities for children with visual impairments to learn new skills, through a variety of multi-sensory activities. This is a partial list of some of the activities that can encourage sensory exploration in tactile, visual, auditory, smell and taste, as well as helping to develop beginning literacy and numeracy skills.
Tactile
- Feel bread and cake dough
- Feel flour, margarine, sugar, icing sugar, eggs
- Whisk eggs, whisk cake mixture, make cakes, make bread mix (packet mix)
- Feel bread dough rising and changing in shape.
- Feel difference in cake/bread when uncooked and then baked.
- Decorating Cakes
- Wearing baker’s hat and overalls, hair net.
- Feeling the equipment used to bake with – plastic spatula, bowl, whisk, spoon, scales, cake cutters, tins, rolling pin.
- Rolling pastry.
- Make pastry shaped numbers or letters.
Visual
- Contrasting cake equipment, in bright colours to ensure flour, eggs, etc stand out against bowl.
- Bright coloured chopping board to roll pastry out on.
- Bright coloured cake decorations.
Sound
- Whisking, beating eggs noise, dough being kneaded, tins rattling, sound of rolling pin on pastry being rolled.
Taste
- Taste bread and cakes
Smell
- Smell bread and cakes
Literacy
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Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, Bakers Man
Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, bakers man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Pat it and prick it,
And mark it with B.
Put it in the oven,
For baby and me.
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Ten Fat Sausages
Ten fat sausages, sizzling in the pan,
Ten fat sausages, sizzling in the pan,
And if one went POP!
and the other went Bang!
There’ll be eight fat sausages,
sizzling in the pan,
Eight fat sausages, sizzling in the pan.
And if one went POP!
and the other went BANG!
Continue counting down until all the sausages have gone.
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The Queen of Hearts
The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts,
All on a summers day.
The Knave of Hearts,
He stole those tarts,
And took them clean away.
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Pancake Song
Mix a pancake,
Beat a pancake,
Put it in a pan.
Cook a pancake,
Toss a pancake,
Catch it if you can
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Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
Lay a little egg for me.
Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
I want one for my tea.
I haven’t had an egg since Easter,
And now it’s half past three.
So, chick, chick, chick, chicken,
Lay a little egg for me
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Numeracy
- Count cakes, slices of breads – feel shape of bread
- Make bread in shape of numbers
- Shapes of pastry cutters and tins, round, square, sort by shape and size.
- Cutting bread dough into sections to make bread rolls – counting number.
There are more shared ideas at www.positiveeye.co.uk
