Fun Food Apps to Encourage Healthy Eating
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PSN Team 
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Fun Food Apps
How many of us remember our parents telling us “Don’t play with your food!” as we were growing up? Well, the apps listed below encourage talking about food, playing games with food, exploring cooking and learning about nutrition in fun and engaging ways. Pretend play, new vocabulary and video modeling offer helpful, practical ways to explore healthy eating in a low stress approach that can be fun for siblings, parents and friends to play together. So go ahead, have fun with food!
Toca Boca Jr
By Piknik
Toca Kitchen 2 app is a fun way to explore food, cooking, and nutrition. Toca Boca apps are known for their engaging and interactive games that can be customized to fit the needs of all users. Toca Kitchen 2 is a sequel to the popular Toca Kitchen series. The app features three new characters, new ingredients, and new tools. Users choose foods from the left side of the screen and cooking utensils from the right side of the screen. At the bottom of the screen, the user is given seasonings to spice or add a citrus twist to foods. Toca Kitchen 2 can be used as a conversation starter for discussions about food groups, healthy choices, and ways to cook. After using the app, families can prepare items to show how the foods look in real life.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Flashcards for Kids – First Food Words
By Innovative Mobile Apps
Flashcards for Kids – First Food Words is an app that provides flashcards on your iOS device. This app is perfect for early learners and ELL students. Food images are high quality and narration is clear.
Pictures are paired with a word and users simply touch the screen to move to the next picture. The free version includes common foods including breakfast, dinner and vegetables with an option to unlock other foods such as types of candy and desserts.
A few skills that can be targeted with this app are imitation of single and multi-syllabic words, word recognition, categorization and vocabulary building.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Available for: iOS
IDo Food – Kids with special needs learn dining skills (Full version)
By C.E.T – THE CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY
Do Food addresses seven areas regarding preparing food. The areas include making chocolate milk, washing fruit, making sandwiches, making a salad, setting the table, heating up food in the microwave and eating with a fork and knife. Each skill includes a video and a sequencing guide. Upon completion of these activities the student can make a video and their own sequencing cards using the iPad camera and upload from iCloud.
The app is ideal for kids who are working on life skills and/or Independence. We appreciate that the app builds on skills using visual, auditory and kinesthetic activities to reinforce important daily living skills.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Available for: iOS
Duckie Deck Sandwich Chef
By Duckie Deck Development
Duckie Deck Sandwich Chef is a play app created for early learners to teach nutrition, develop creativity, thinking and reasoning skills. This engaging app supports wholesome eating habits from an early age, encouraging kids to sample a variety of healthy foods.
Children decorate a sandwich with funny faces and playful shapes. The app is simple to use, the graphics are colorful and child-friendly and the music and sound effects are fun.
Price: Amazon $0.99
Available for: Amazon
My Daily Plate
By USDA Food & Nutrition Service
The My Daily Plate app is an independent, self-monitoring nutrition tool based on the USDA ChooseMyPlate icon that serves as a guide for making healthier food choices. With this easy, user-friendly app, there is no typing, no keyboard, no data entry required. With a few simple taps, you enter your food and track your success.
Teach kids to track their eating, hit goals, and focus on success, all in one easy-to-use app. Inspired by the USDA’s MyPlate icon, My Daily Plate makes eating right easy and fun.
Price: FREE | Offers In-App Purchases
Available for: iOS
Available for Android
If you are interested in searching for more apps, creating your own list of apps and sharing them, please go to BridgingApps.org. BridgingApps, a program of Easter Seals Greater Houston, is a community of parents, therapists, doctors and teachers who share information about using mobile devices with people who have special needs.
Cristen Reat is co-founder of BridgingApps and a mother who found success when using a mobile device with her children who have special needs.
Amy Barry is the Content Manager and Editor at BridgingApps and mother of five children.
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This post originally appeared on our March/April 2017 Magazine
