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Fall in love with food by PLAYING with it! These activities include lots of original and irresistible sensory play ideas to engage the whole body. Better yet, they might even convert a dubious eater into a happy hands-on explorer of food!

Play With Your Pasta!

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Play With Your Pasta!

Activity ideas for play with food - dry pasta in a jar

Ready

  • Large bin or tub
  • Dried spaghetti
  • Small bowls
  • Dried pasta of various shapes and sizes
  • Tongs/Forks/Chopsticks
Activity ideas for play with food - young child reaching into a big bin of wet spaghetti

Set

  • Cook and cool the spaghetti.
  • Transfer your noodles to a bin or deep tray with a little bit of olive or canola oil.
Activity ideas for play with food- two toddlers playing with wet spaghetti

Play!

  • Roll up your sleeves and play with the noodles however you see fit!
  • Extend the play by adding in your small bowls.
  • Try scooping, pinching, separating, and transferring your noodles. 
  • Serve up your dried pasta in order to examine, compare, and contrast the different textures.
  • If you are a sensory-sensitive child, we encourage the use of chopsticks, forks, and tongs as a way to get closer to the experience of wet noodles.

Play your way! What else can you do with these open-ended materials?

*Please consider reboiling your pasta when you are done, and serving it for dinner!

Why Play This Way?

Play with food to encourage a feeling of freedom and permissiveness around food. A life rich with a love of food includes tactile and sensory adventures, intimate family moments, scientific experimentation, and of course great health! So get messy, and play to build a familiarity with diverse foods that will inspire delight and joy in your whole family for years to come.

Better with a Book

At LᐧMᐧNᐧOᐧPlay!, we love to pair our play with a great book.

Food ​​& Sensory

Extension Activities

Choose your own adventure! Select any of the extension activities or resources below and see where your play takes you next. They all build on the same play theme to extend your learning in even more ways.

Activity ideas for play with food: Food Sensory Bins Button
Activity ideas for play with food - Food Prep Button
Activity ideas for play with food - Spotify Playlist Button
Activity ideas for play with food - Frozen Food Exploration Button
Activity ideas for play with food - Doughlicious button
Activity ideas for play with food - Related Books & Materials button
Activity ideas for play with food - Food Re-play button
Activity ideas for play with food - Sniff This button

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keep playing

more fun activities

Whoever said work isn’t fun?! These activities, inspired by Joan Heilbroner’s marvelous book “Robert the Rose Horse”, reinforce the notion that “Play is the work of childhood!” Explore countless opportunities to notice the important jobs and workers around you. Then, discover the ways that even the youngest among us can be workers too!

Splish, Splash I’m not takin’ a bath…I’m just playing with water! These activities are designed to delight your little one with all the sensory fun of water while also delivering the soothing social and emotional benefits inherent in this type of play. Discover ways to play with water in all kinds of places and with unexpected materials.

Make math time happy with these fun counting activities. #1: Create your own abacus. #2: Count and play all day! These activity ideas provide a playful introduction to counting and the many ways that we encounter and use math in everyday life.

Roll on into fruit play! Have a blast experiencing fruit in new and hilarious ways that will get you moving and laughing. Get your muscles ready, but be prepared! These activities might make you hungry and ready to quickly transition from playing to eating!

This game brings all the creative fun of printmaking to the sensory goodness of dough play and then adds a clever twist! You make the prints, and your friend guesses what you used to make them. But watch out…it’s simple to make a mark, but easy to be fooled when you are the guesser. When you’re done with the game, keep playing with The Dough Project’s super, all natural, dough.

Feeling big emotions is perfectly healthy. However, for young children, this can be scary because they feel and are out of control. This play, inspired by Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall, will give you new ideas for how to be brave even in the face of big challenges.

Play ideas for all those times you need a little gentle, quiet fun. Reach for these activities whenever you are looking for ways to create a soothing environment or bring calm to your mind and body.

This activity is pure magic.✨ Children will be filled with wonder as they prepare their special fairy houses and adults will be transported to the joy of being a child again.

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What’s black and white all over? This play activity! Invite your child to explore this amazing play that will inspire curiosity and ignite their inner designer. In experimenting and examining each object independent of its color your little one will engage more deeply with all of the other properties of the play materials they are using. Open-ended and easy to set up this original play is sure to be a winner for children of ALL ages.

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