Rainbow Spaghetti: A colorful sensory activity for all ages!
This will most likely go down in history as one of my toddlers favorite activities! It got a little messy but was loads of fun! With how easy it was to make this rainbow spaghetti, I’m sure we will be doing this sensory activity again in the near future! Let’s take a quick look at how sensory play like this is beneficial for their growing minds.
What is Sensory Play?
Sensory play includes any activity that incorporates the five common senses.
Activities that involve movement of the body, such as awareness or position of their body) can also be considered sensory activities. When you think about it, so many activities that our babies do in their day-to-day play could be considered a sensory activity! If you would like to browse all of the sensory activities, we have shared on Little Learning Club, you can do so here.
A few examples of sensory play include balancing while walking on a curb, making moon sand, or doing a taste test of a variety of fruits. Listening to kids’ audiobooks is another fun and educational sensory activity!
Benefits of Sensory Play
Creating activities for children to actively use their senses as they explore their world through sensory play is crucial to brain development. Sensory Play helps to build nerve connections in the brain’s pathways. Sensory activities encourage the development of fine and gross motor skills as well as language development. While the idea of setting up an activity that has THIS many benefits may seem intimidating, it is actually quite simple! The more you research these types of activities, the more you realize that there are opportunities for sensory learning just about everywhere!
The Benefits of Sensory Play in Babies (0mo-12mo)
Sensory play helps babies to learn more about the world around them! Sensory playtime creates a whole new world of stimuli (think new textures they have never felt or new sounds they have never heard). Your baby’s brain creates new connections as they play and experience all these new stimulations. Simple sensory play can help your baby grow in so many ways!
The Benefits of Sensory Play: Toddlers (13mo-3 yrs)
As your baby becomes a toddler, there is a whole new level of skills they are working to develop, like language skills and cognitive abilities. This opens up a whole new world of sensory play possibilities. Try to incorporate activities that allow them to be a little more independent while also incorporating age-appropriate educational aspects like color matching, sorting smallest to largest or vice versa, and matching.
The Benefits of Sensory Play: Preschoolers (3-5 yrs)
Starting at the age of three, the independence in play really increases. Aim to find activities that allow this and encourage it! Language development is also increasing at a rapid rate. Challenge your preschooler to tell you more about what they are doing during their sensory play. Can they tell you a story about their activity? What challenges are they facing? This will also help boost the cognitive development of the activity.
How to Color Spaghetti for Sensory Play
With Nora being 11 months old and Emmy just passing the two-year mark, it’s rare to find sensory activities they both enjoy. Nora’s love of putting everything in her mouth usually excludes her from Emmy’s activities and Emmy is usually bored with Nora’s.
But this rainbow spaghetti was perfect for both of them!
What started out as a fun, clean activity escalated very quickly. If you plan to do this, I would recommend putting a shower curtain down. The spaghetti is made with a little bit of oil and that helped it slide right off of the shower curtain back into the tub. I just collected all the spaghetti in the center, kind of funneled the curtain and within a few seconds, everything was back in the sensory bin.
Here’s here’s how we made the spaghetti:
- Cook the spaghetti as you regularly would. We did two boxes to make the amount you see here.
- Drain as usual. I rinsed with cool water while it was still in the colander to keep it from sticking together.
- Once drained and cooled, add a small (very small) amount of oil and toss.
- Add a few drops of food coloring and mix well
- Lay spaghetti out on parchment paper to dry for about 1 hour
We are always sharing fun activities like this one for both babies and toddler on our Instagram page! Be sure to follow along @LittleLearningClub
