Spooky spaghetti

This…this is the bin that you need to bookmark, screen shot, do whatever will help you to remember it but if you want some time to be able to accomplish a task while your kids have their hands occupied this will do it! A spooky spaghetti sensory bin, filled with all sorts of Halloween inspired trinkets that I’ve picked up from the Dollar store and the $1 section at Target. I’ve made dozens of activities for them with dried pasta but it never occurred to me try one with cooked macaroni until last weekend when dinner turned into it’s own squishy mess. I took a cue from their joy of squeezing their food in-between their slimy fingers that it was clearly something they really enjoyed (as much as I was not amused) and that is when this idea was born.

This is a pretty inexpensive bin to put together and maybe you’re still living off your quarantine stockpile of pasta that you wont even need to buy any but if not you can scoop up the cheapest spaghetti there is, I found some for .99 at our grocery store. To color the pasta you can either use paint, or food coloring like I did. I wasn’t sure if my almost 2 year old would try and eat it so I wanted to make it kid friendly. I also added some distilled vinegar to help with the colors but you can skip that part as well if you don’t want to use it or don’t have it handy. Let it dry fully overnight before putting this activity together, otherwise you’ll have food colored fingers for days.

Once your spaghetti is dry all you need to do is grab a tray to put it in and set up. I have a bunch of the craft trays I’ve picked up from Michaels and they are great for activities like this! The kids scissors they were using to cut up the spaghetti are also from Michaels, with the exception of the yellow ones which came in a Kiwi box that we tried out last year. Once you have your supplies just dump the pasta in the tray and then cover it with the $1 items you picked up, or may have lying around from last Halloween! I grabbed some rats, bats, skulls and eyeballs and hid some under everything so they would need to find squish around to find them and they really really enjoyed playing with the entire thing! After the almost hour they used it I decided to move all the macaroni into a Tupperware so they could use it again, it’s currently in the fridge going on round number 4 of being used!