Welcome back to Un-Toy Friday! If you missed last week’s edition on rocks, catch up with us by checking out that post later 🙂

I am absolutely in love with this week’s feature: pasta. I love to eat it and I love using it in activities for my boys! Also, it’s super versatile- It can be a preschool math manipulative, or a toddler sensory bin filler (and lots more in between!).

First, a word on how to make plain pasta more colorful! Dying it is simple and adds a bit more interest to the play.

Supplies:

  • Rubbing alcohol
  • Your choice of dry pasta
  • Ziplock bags
  • Food coloring
  • Wax paper

Portion the dry pasta into your desired number of Ziplock bags (you’ll want a bag for each color pasta you plan on making).
Add a few teaspoons of alcohol to each bag. Just enough to wet the pasta-you don’t need them soaking with alcohol.
Add in desired amount of food coloring to each bag. Mix it all up until you get even coverage on the pasta.
Lay the pasta flat to dry. I would recommend laying it on wax paper, but others have used newspaper as well.

Now the 5 ways to play with it:

1. Mix it with a sensory dough (like cloud dough!)

(Never made cloud dough before? Check out the how-to here!)
2. Make a necklace out of it

3. Use it in a quick activity for your munchkins while you make dinner (See 10 other simple play ideas for your little ones while you make dinner in this post!)
4. Use fish shaped pasta to make a homemade game!
5. Make window art with it!
(note that this activity requires the pasta to be cooked/wet in order to work! Make sure to see how to do that in this post!)
What other ways to do play with rainbow pasta? I’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments below! Or leave me a picture on my Facebook page so I can share it with others :-)