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Cooking with your little one who is visually impaired can bring wonderful joy and provide many opportunities to build a wide variety of life skills!
The kitchen is the perfect environment for teaching children many concepts that will help them develop crucial skills that can be used both in and out of the kitchen. Cooking involves all five senses – touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight – providing a variety of multisensory learning experiences for even our youngest children.

From pizza to sugar cookies to pumpkin pie play dough, our recipes are simple and family friendly, with most requiring five ingredients or fewer. Each step includes sensory suggestions for parents to explore with their child.

The recipes include important strategies for parents to practice while cooking with their child, such as hand-under-hand technique, narration, and wait time. Following a recipe helps children understand that things happen in a sequence from beginning to middle to end. Learning occurs best when children have hands-on experiences in which they can anticipate what will happen next. Predictable routines build trust and allow for mastery of skills through repetition.

Finally, cooking together provides a shared experience that enhances communication between parent and child.

We hope you’ll enjoy these recipes . You’ll think about cooking in a whole new way once you try using all your senses. And you’ll get a “taste” of our teachers’ toolbox – what A Shared Vision’s teachers do with their families in 200 homes across Colorado each year!

Important Tips & Basic Strategies

With each step in every recipe, we provide sensory suggestions for parents to engage with their child. Read more about important kitchen tips and basic strategies for cooking with a child who's visually impaired.

Sensory Learning

Children with visual impairments need to learn to use ALL their senses – vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, including movement, vibration, temperature, and weight. This is the most important strategy in this collection of recipes.

When introducing something new to a child, try stimulating one sense at a time to minimize sensory input so as not to overwhelm the child. Vary your approach the next time you do the activity. For example, if you’re playing with pumpkin pie play dough, maybe the first time your child might just smell it.

The next time they might touch the dough with their fingers or their feet. The third time you might introduce a spoon so your child can pound the dough and listen to the sound it makes.

A Shared Vision: Partners in Pediatric Blindness & Visual Impairment

EIN 81-4227664