One of our favourite messy activities is cooked rainbow spaghetti. Its cheap and easy to make and, well- messy lol! Surprisingly it can entertain the kids for a while. We made it when my son was younger and have since made it when we’ve had kids at the house and with my daughter.
All you need is dry spaghetti and food colouring!! Literally that is it.
You also need;
- A large pot half filled with water
- Some bowls to separate the spaghetti for colours
- Something to combine the food colour like a ziplock bag or container
- A large container to use for play
Boil up the spaghetti for about 10 minutes until you can bite through it. If your kids don’t intend on eating some before playing with it, then it doesn’t have to be perfectly cooked.
Mixing The Colours
I separated our spaghetti into 5 bowls so we could have 5 colours. I boiled up the whole pack so we would have plenty, but it is completely optional how much you cook.
Colour Me Happy 🙂
There we go! Rainbow spaghetti done. Simple, quick and SO pretty. 🌈
We didn’t have any yellow this time around, so we used a lime green. The first time we made rainbow spaghetti I found yellow was very pale in contrast to the other colours. Still pretty though. We also made orange too. This was the first time we made it;
I will warn you, this is a VERY messy activity but as long as you don’t mind your kids getting their hands covered in oily coloured pasta then your fine! The colours will run into their hands but it does wash off easily with soap and water.
You can add tools like scissors for cutting the spaghetti or a sieve for threading the spaghetti through. Good for fine motor skills!
Adding kitchen utensils will gear your child to use concentration skills. The sieve was tricky but was fun none the less for my daughter to try.
She did prefer just mixing her hands into it and getting messy however lol!
Halloween Messy Play
We have made this before during halloween, but we only used ‘halloween colours’ ORANGE, GREEN and PURPLE. I added some plastic eyeballs and spiders in it to create yucky slimy halloween play fun. The kids said it was like playing with worms lol!
Rainbow Dinner?
My kids actually wanted to eat some of their spaghetti with their meatballs and garlic bread for dinner. So before they got to play with it, I took a little out for them to eat. It is completely safe for them to eat as it is food colour that we use. You just might not want to give them too much 😬 But it’s fun for them to try.
A fun activity that will keep the kids happy and busy for a while. You can always store the spaghetti in a container for the following day but in my experience, it does get a bit gross once all the colours are mixed in so we usually dispose of ours.
Other Food Play Activities
Food can be fun for other play activities with kids. We’ve used all kinds of kitchen ingredients for our sensory activities. Check out our oobleck recipe.
Oobleck is a super fun and easy sensory activity for kids of all ages. Just 2-3 ingredients makes this slimy substance that will keep the kids busy for hours.. okay maybe not hours lol! But for a while anyway 😉
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