This was an awesome rainy day sensory activity! It was incredibly easy to make, engaged both kids as well as us parents, and was even surprisingly easy to clean up! The rainbow pasta provides an opportunity to teach colors through play. It is also a great way to learn the colors of the rainbow. You start by boiling your spaghetti
as you would for eating, once it has cooked, rinse in under cold water in a colander.
While the spaghetti was cooking we filled Easter eggs with edible treasures (Ava-friendly) to stick with our Spring/Easter themed play that we have been doing.
We then prepared our plastic bags for coloring the pasta. We chose four different colors, pink, green, yellow and blue. You simply put a few few drops of food coloring in a bag with a couple tablespoons of water then add the cooked pasta.
Give the bags a good shake to distribute the color evenly, put the pasta back into the colander and rinse it with cool water to wash away all of the excess dye. You will then have bright and beautiful rainbow pasta! How fun and easy is that?!
You can also do variations of this with rainbow rice or rainbow crystals, however the pasta is more baby-friendly and edible! At this point you can choose to just serve it as you normal would for a really fun kid’s meal, however we chose to play with it 🙂
I added our treasure-filled eggs to the pasta and placed it all in the middle of a plastic tablecloth taped to our kitchen floor and stripped my kids down to their diaper and underwear! This allowed them to have the space to play and make a mess while really exploring the texture, color and taste of the pasta!
They were both thrilled with being able to eat their play materials, Mack called it a sensory lunch. We played for a while shaking and opening the eggs and squishing the pasta in our hands. Then the fun really started…it evolved into a full on family food fight!
We were all covered in rainbow pasta and smiles by the end of our play. Talk about a fun rainy day!
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