The University of Delaware’s Cooperative Extension held two camps during the summer of 2018 geared towards teaching children with visual and hearing disabilities about healthy eating.

One camp was held at BlindSight Delaware, a non-profit located in Wilmington, and the other held at the Delaware School for the Deaf in Newark.

Sue Snider, professor and food safety and nutrition specialist, said the Cooperative Extension nutrition assistants taught a summer camp curriculum called Choose Health: Food, Fun and Fitness, which was a series of 5 lessons based on MyPlate.

“We do one session on what’s in your drink and they measure out the amount of sugar in drinks from a soda or orange juice versus milk,” Snider said. “They look at labels to see what other nutrients are on there.”

Other lessons included one on the amount of fats in fast foods and fries.

“They measure out the amount of fat on that so they can visually see how much fat is in this and that not all of the fast foods are created equally,” Snider said. “Some are lower fat than others.”

The curriculum is geared towards 8-12 year olds and involves lots of fun, hands-on activities to get the students excited about healthy eating.

“It’s kid friendly, we try to do fun things,” Snider said. “We do as little paper and pencil as possible. I think the food prep is perhaps one of the big things that’s different. A lot of these kids have never tried certain things and preparing a dish like calabacitas, which has onions, corn and tomatoes or zucchini or yellow squash, a lot of the kids have never had zucchini. Parents will say, ‘How did you get my kid to eat zucchini?’ They were asking for zucchini and it was so unusual.”

BlindSight

Anita Cooper, a nutrition assistant for extension, was involved in the BlindSight camp and she taught the visually impaired students about nutrition and safe food prep for two hours a day.

“We talked about nutrition and we brought a lot of what we call food models — which are plastic food that looks like real food, like a plate of broccoli or baked beans. All the kids could feel those and we showed them portions and things like that.”

In addition, the campers were able to get involved in the actual cooking of the food and the cutting of the vegetables.

“We even had them use can openers that we decided were safer for them, they just had hit a button and they open up the can all by themselves and don’t leave any sharp edges so they couldn’t get hurt on it,” Cooper said. “We also purchased knives that were plastic but able to cut through the vegetables so they were safer and they worked on the frying pan and stirring and mixing things up like that.”

Cooper even created a special version of MyPlate which had hot glue rims around the individual sections with the categories identifying grains, vegetables and fruits so the kids could understand the portion sizes they were supposed to be eating of each.

Cooper said that the campers were a lot of fun to work with and had a great sense of humor.

“One of the boys,” Cooper said, “and I think he was 16 or 17, I gave him a food model tomato and he was holding it and he’s completely blind and he said, ‘Oh, this is an apple’ and I said ‘Very close but it’s a tomato’ and he said, ‘I’ve never held a real tomato. Somebody will always cut my food up for me.’ That statement really stood out to me.”  

Delaware School for the Deaf

Michelle Voegele, a Cooperative Extension Nutrition Assistant, ran the camp held at the Delaware School for the Deaf and said that she focused on recipes, the amount of sugar in drinks, the amount of fats in various foods and the different kinds of vegetables that are available.

Voegele, who is able to communicate in sign language, said the students and the teachers responded to having direct interaction with someone from UD.

“My contact there said ‘It’s so nice to be able to have somebody from UD that can have direct communication with the kids,’ ” Voegele said. “It’s a lot different than having an interpreter because then they’re watching the interpreter, they’re not watching you. When it’s just, you have a more personal experience when you’re actually hearing from the person that’s presenting.”

One of the biggest challenges for Voegele was figuring out ways around words or phrases that don’t translate easily into sign language — as well as learning words like ‘nutrition’ in sign language.

“Sign language is sometimes very literal,” Voegele said. “I have to try and make different comparisons for them that make more sense. I also have to use more visuals because I don’t know everything in sign language and they don’t know some of the words that I’m saying just because it’s not common for them to hear that. Like diabetes, I had to try and explain what diabetes is, versus in a hearing group, diabetes is common.”

Using visuals, such as food labels and pictures, also allowed her to get her points across as well and that the students enjoyed the food prep portion of the camp—with one of the students who was interested in film making even going so far as to interview and take video clips during the food prep.  

“They had a lot of fun prepping the food,” Voegele said. “They wanted to take the lead on it and they enjoyed the tangible things that they could see and touch and feel.”

Snider said that she is very proud of these programs and that Cooperative Extension always tries to include everybody in their programming.

“We want to be inclusive and one of the ways that we’re doing that is to reach out,” Snider said. “To me, it’s a positive for the University. From a University standpoint, this is the contact that they have with the University. I think we’re out there in communities that UD might not touch as much and it makes a real impact that somebody from UD is coming to do this program for them.”