THE DINNER CLUB
The Dinner Club is a way for us to help picky eaters + expose them to both cooking food + eating foods. The group setting we offer and weekly introduction to both fun cooking exercises and simple fresh foods allows kids to realize that food can be FUN. We introduce a new food every week in this weekly social eating group for picky eaters.
The Dinner Club is a weekly social group for those children who are picky eaters and also for budding chefs! We do lots of food exploration and cooking too!
Our trained occupational therapists utilize a "sensory friendly" and developmental approach to foster safe exploration as well social skills around mealtime and cooking. The small group setting allows for shared engagement around familiar and novel foods and provides natural opportunities to cook, explore, eat, and share food experiences through all 8 body senses. The group incorporates developmentally appropriate cooking and safety skills while introducing new foods each week. The goal of Dinner Club is to have FUN while providing an invitation to experience new foods through meaningful interactions, even play! Families are given weekly homework assignments (i.e. activities and oral-motor exercises) to help generalize skills from Dinner Club to the home environment.
While picky eaters can be challenging and overwhelming, the dinner club can help!
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We know that one manifestation of SPD is an appetite for sensation that is in perpetual overdrive.
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The goal of treatment for children with SPD is to get neural “traffic” flowing smoothly so that they can participate in the normal activities of daily life and enjoy the social and emotional rewards that come with success.
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We think that most children with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) are just as intelligent as their peers.
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In fact, we see many who are intellectually gifted; their brains simply just process sensory stimuli differently.
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In a study of children born between July 1995 and September 1997 in the New Haven, CT area 16% of 7 to 11 year olds had symptoms of SPD-SOR (Ben-Sasson et al., 2009). That is the same as 1 in 6 children. An earlier study in younger children (Ahn et al., 2004) found a prevalence of 5%, which is 1 in 20 children.
Email us to join The Dinner Club...
