Children love messy play. Messy play is good for them, it teaches them about texture, exploration, imagination, fine/gross motor skills and art. But above all, it’s FUN! However, many mums out there I know are cringing at the thought of all the mess. It can be difficult enough keeping on top children’s mess, let alone after messy play, so how about this…..
Spaghetti art
Spaghetti is a very easy, relatively mess free (for the grown ups), fun, creative way to play.
I cooked some pasta and let it cool. I then gave my children a couple of bowls each of spaghetti and a piece of paper, to see what we could do.
First, they enjoyed trying to create some pictures using the spaghetti. I showed them how you could make drawings, then we tried letters. It was a fun way to introduce some letter teaching. They loved experimenting with what they could create.
Next, they played with it. They explored the texture, the stickiness of it, its sliminess and the wobbliness. There were definitely lots of giggles going on. It also sparked lots of conversation about their experience of it, so fab for language development too.
If you don’t like mess, you could stop here, there is lots of fun to be had with clean mess.
However, if you are daring, then, I recommend taking the next step and introducing paint! I gave my girls a bit of paint of each colour to dip the spaghetti in and use it to create a picture. This was definitely messy fun. The spaghetti became very slimy.
The girls made prints with the pasta and they tried dragging the spaghetti across the page to make patterns. Then of course the ultimate happened…..a big splodgy mess! But hey, they loved it, so I don’t mind cleaning it up. We did also progress to a bit of finger painting too while the paint was out. Actually, I don’t think there was too much mess considering.
This was the aftermath of their spaghetti art……
