GiGi’s Kitchen Adult: Chef Language!

Everyone is familiar with the signature GiGi’s program, GiGi’s Kitchen! GiGi’s Kitchen is designed to emphasize the importance of a healthy lifestyle and early exposure to practical cooking skills. Our participants engage in activities designed to promote healthy eating habits, kitchen safety awareness, food preparation skills, self-confidence, and social skills by applying learned skills as they prepare and enjoy a shared meal/snack.

GiGi’s Kitchen-Language Chef will incorporate our individuals speech and language goals with essential skills for language development, pragmatics, healthy eating, and cooking. This client centered approach is designed to motivate, educate, and collaborate with participants, SLP’s, and community members to develop a wholistic, purposeful language program necessary to advance language skill acquisition.

Cooking skills + Speech skills = GiGi’s Kitchen Adult- Chef Language! Here from our SLP’s and student interns about this amazing program!

Hear From our Team!

Kara Nunn, M.S. CCC-SLP, BCS-CL: “For the student portion, undergraduate students work within the IPE (interprofessional Education framework) to integrate goals (cooking/life skill/individual participant) with SLP goals for language and communication tasks.  This is based on a vocabulary forward approach because vocabulary is correlated both with social and academic outcomes.  The vocabulary and visual aids support literacy and comprehension by building adaptations that reduce the recipe length and complexity. Each week we work with the nutritionists (our interprofessional staff) to create and adapt a menu.  The student then works with the SLP’s to develop vocabulary and key concept goals to build visual aids to reduce the load of recall.  

They [the interns]:

• Meet weekly to review the week and plan for the next week
• Select a menu item
• identify the key concepts
• Build the visual aids
• Create shopping lists and modify directions
• Attend the session where they collect data on specific dates and volunteer during programming
• They also set up and break down.

Cody Dew, MA, CCC-SLP: “Kara has developed adaptations to the existing GiGi’s Kitchen program with the aim to improve participant’s ability to complete tasks independently and maximize their learning and social engagement. Together, we have developed a rigorous research study to evaluate the impact these adaptations have. This research is important because it will contribute to evidence-based practices for speech-language pathologists and GiGi’s programming. Currently, there is not a lot of research on these types of programs and clinical approaches. The study we are conducting now helps fill this gap in research and will pave the way for future studies. Ultimately, the goal is to research and develop the most efficient practices to support the individuals GiGi’s serves.”

Alessandra Antonacci, Student Intern: “To build on top of what Professor Nunn said, we planned some of our own recipe ideas and, as the weeks approach, we work with the SLPs (Professor Nunn and Professor Dew) to create modified recipe templates that will allow the kitchen participants to have greater independence as they’re cooking. The modified recipe templates include a sentence of written instruction as well as a photo to accompany the next step. It’s awesome to see the participants move at their own pace with the modified instructions while still having a lot of fun conversation with their peers!”