Rainbow Spaghetti

Infant+

When X was quite small, S and I decided to make some rainbow spaghetti.  Cook spaghetti as usual.  Once it is cooked, rinse it with cool water.  If you are using it for infant play, I would recommend cooking it and presenting it plain at this point.  Though food coloring is "safe", it's not recommended for babies to consume, so plain uncolored spaghetti would be best for babies who are still apt to mouth things.

For older children who are beyond mouthing, you can either use food coloring, or you can use liquid watercolors (from Discount School Supply) as we did here.  Having used both, I feel like you get much more vibrant colors with fewer drops if you use liquid watercolors, so that's what we use for most of our colored activities.  Just add a quantity of pasta and several drops of whatever coloring you're using to a ziploc bag - seal and shake!  The shaking is a good job for an older child.  I was able to use just one ziploc bag by rinsing it out quickly between each color.

After smooshing around in it a bit, we brought out S's scissors for some cutting practice. 

It later became a play world with some of her plastic "guys".

And after that, we used it to make art on paper (I didn't remember to take any pictures of that part, though, oops!).  The natural stickiness of the wet pasta helps it adhere to the paper without using glue (though you could also use glue!).  We made waves and spirals and left them out to dry.  S had fun playing with the dried pasta shapes the next day and enjoyed snapping them.

I have also seen people add cooked spaghetti to baths, though I bet you'd need to give your tub a good scrub afterwards to get off any residue.  Seems like it could otherwise be fun to take a "worm" bath!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.