Making tasting fun early on can help your child be in tune with their sense of taste and enjoy exploring different flavours. Here are a few games ideas to make tasting lots of fun.

Guess the taste

This is simple but fun. Cut up different small samples of food and see if your child can guess what they are – try sorting them into sweet, sour, salty. Remember they are only young, so not too heavy on the spices. You could make different flavoured jellies and place samples into cupcake cases, making sure you have two of each flavour. See if your child can taste them and sort them into pairs.

Taste and read

Combine tasting with a book themed around food. You could make a caterpillar made from the items he eats in ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ story. Or ask them to find the taste you are reading about on each page. Another early years book to try is ‘Chocolate Moose for Greedy Goose’ – set out a sensory table and see if they can find and taste cooked and cooled macaroni, carrot and chocolate mouse at the right parts of the story!

Can you make a…

Use food as shapes to make edible picture blocks. Suggest different pictures to try and make and race each other. The winner gets to eat the picture. You could use thin carrot slices, banana slices or blueberries for circles, bread sticks, cucumber sticks, peas or cheese triangles.

Edible counting and sorting games

Having a selection of different shaped foods can be a fun way of starting to think about sorting objects and thinking about similarities and differences. You could sort them by taste, touch or smell. You can count the items and when they are older count backwards as you eat them. I have 8 satsuma segments… if I eat one I have 7!

Keep exploring…