Everyone has preferences when it comes to food! Your child is continuing to express their likes and dislikes and developing opinions about the world around them. The following activity is a simple way to represent data- I Like to Eat and I Don’t Like to Eat. Using grocery flyers, I cut out food items that are familiar to my child and included a mixture of foods he likes and foods he doesn’t care for. If you don't have flyers, you can print pictures from the internet. This took about 10 minutes to prepare. Next, using two sheets of paper, I wrote on the top of one I like to Eat, and the other I Don’t Like to Eat. Ask your child to go through the pictures and categorize the food items either things he/she likes to eat or doesn’t like to eat. Chart them accordingly by gluing them on the sheet of paper.

 

Things you will Need: 

-food pictures from grocery flyers 

-paper (x2) 

-marker to label the sheets 

-glue stick 

 

Engaging Your Child:

You can open this activity by looking through the food pictures, “Look at these pictures of food here. This one is bananas- you like bananas, right? I do too.” “Over here is avocado. You don’t like it so much.” Next, describe what you will be doing next, “Let’s put all the things you like eating on this sheet of paper and the things that you don’t like to eat on this sheet of paper. I have a glue stick here so that we can glue the pictures onto our papers.” Help your child discuss preferences and provide language for your child. “You tried yams the other day, but you said yucky.” or, “We had peach yogurt this morning and you asked for more. You really enjoy it right?” Providing appropriate language to support expressing personal preferences will support your child in expressing their feelings appropriately and help them to understand that we are all different and have different likes and dislikes, which is perfectly ok!

 

Variation: There is no limit to what you can chart but since you have the photos of food items already cut out, you can try Healthy Food/Not Healthy Food, or with older children- categorizing foods into food groups.