Healthy diet has a great impact on a child's physical and mental development and on reducing the risk of developing numerous illnesses and diseases in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. It is part of the educational system, namely part of school meals and curricula. Children with special needs, especially children with intellectual disabilities, are a group in which obesity often develops due to the interaction of various factors. Therefore, it is of great importance that both children and their parents are taught early on by a team of experts on the topic of healthy eating and physical activity. In Slovenia, there is no cookbook adapted to easy-to-read yet. Children with intellectual disabilities have problems reading and understanding the texts written in the standard way. Therefore, they need simplified texts that facilitate their reading and enable them to access information and thus achieve a higher level of independence. When preparing easy-to-read materials, many things need to be taken into account: the characteristics of the target audience, rules for writing, formatting and printing the texts, and cooperation with the target population. By adapting recipes into easy-to-read audiovisual materials and cooperation with teachers and pupils, which was the goal of a master's thesis, children can learn to use the recipes independently and prepare healthy snacks safely. At the same time, children, parents, teachers and society are educated and preventive measures are taken in the field of health and heathy diet. The results of our research have shown that children with intellectual disabilities can independently prepare healthy snacks when they use an easy read cookbook.. We have also found that audio-visual materials in cookbooks increase independence and motivation in preparing a dish. On the other hand, children with intellectual disabilities have problems with duration of concentration in reading and work organization even after the research, which is typical for their condition. They also have problems with hygiene in the kitchen. Our easy-to-read cookbook will be available to the general public and will be published by Zveza Sožitje and Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana.
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