How to Use a Gingerbread House to Support Speech, Language, Feeding, and Sensory Processing
By SMILE Therapists: Jenna Hart, MS, CCC-SLP and Jayme Petronchak, MOT, OTR/L
What's sweeter than eating the gingerbread house itself? All the sensory experiences that come with it! Messy play is a great way to support your child’s sensory development as they explore the smells, sights, textures and more of the experience. Messy play helps foster kids' creativity and imagination, their sense of self, their concentration/attention and encourages language and communication during the task.
Gradually exposing children to food can make picky eaters more comfortable, by working together with your child to lay out the ingredients allowing them to gradually acclimate towards the touch, sight and smell. Have your child take the pieces out of the box, spread the frosting, and put it all together. Talk about the different properties (I.e., color, shape, size) of each part of the house as you build. It can be helpful to draw comparisons to preferred foods your child likes. For example, wow this cookie is brown and round like a Ritz cracker!
Work on expressive language by having child decide the colors they want to decorate with. To work on expressing thoughts and ideas, have the child think of objects to decorate the houses (I.e., snowmen, candy canes). To make the activity more challenging, try to develop a story or picture scene about the house. Get silly! Retell the story of The Three Little Pigs and the wolf who blew down the gingerbread house. This is also a great opportunity to work on problem solving as a team! You can say “OH NO! The house won’t stay up! What should we do!?”, as an opportunity to work on social problem solving skills, ideation, and compromise.
To support processing and following directions, start with one-step directions (such as “find the blue gumdrop”) and progress to multi-step directions (such as “place the icing on top of the graham cracker, then put the gumdrops in a line”). To set expectations of what's ahead, draw simple pictures to help kids visualize each step of the process (i.e. take out supplies, build structure, decorate).
While building the house, assemble the house together to work on bimanual coordination skills. Squeezing tubes of icing works to strengthen our hand muscles while using a refined pincer grasp to place small candies on the house is a great way to work on hand eye coordination, force grading and developing grasping skills. For added challenges, use a tooth pick to make lines or shapes on the roof, window, sidewalk, etc. for your child to trace with icing for added visual motor work. For older kids, have them follow a pattern or sequence of colored or different shape candies to line the house with.
Don’t forget to send in pictures of your beautiful creations! HAPPY BUILDING!!!!