Cooked Carrot Bunny

Many soft, easy-to-chew foods are processed, like pasta, bread and chicken nuggets, but roasted vegetables like this cooked carrot bunny are a delicious, healthy, soft food to add to the rotation for kids who are still working up to chewing hard, crunchy veggie sticks. Here is a super-simple recipe from Fine Cooking for roasted carrots, but many other veggies like squash and potatoes are delicious roasted and become a perfect mechanical soft texture, too.Have fun building with carrots. Stack them up and make carrot towers and carrot towns. Use carrot rounds as car wheels, eyes for a smiley face, or a surprised mouth. Make an animal, like the bunny above, a pattern or a design.Language And Senses:Mechanical soft foods like roasted veggies, banana and avocado are perfect for making teeth marks. You don't have to press very hard and you can see perfect bite marks. Make bite marks on a carrot and describe how they look, how the carrot feels, how it tastes. When kids know how to describe a food they are much less scared to touch and taste it because they know a lot about it already.Add A Concept:Use pieces of roasted veggies for counting games and simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems. For smaller children, play a turn-taking game and practice putting food in and dumping it out of bowls.Add A Song And Pretend:Pretend pieces of carrot are little bunnies and hop them around while singing Little Bunny Foo Foo. Have fun and happy food play!