How to Dye Pasta for Crafts

It is super double coupon week at Harris Teeter and I managed to snag some pasta for only 30 cents a box! Since we don't eat much pasta in our home I decided to purchase some for the classroom.


Dying pasta is super easy, economical, and has many uses in arts and crafts projects. In our classroom we plan to make necklaces, bracelets, and collages. Stringing the pasta will provide an opportunity to improve fine motor skills. In addition to these ideas we can also use it for counting and making patterns.

As you can see, the pasta turned out bright and colorful. The colors remind me of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Ingredients:

• pasta
• large ziploc bag (I used gallon size)
• food coloring
• vinegar or alcohol
• wax paper

Instructions:

1. Add a few cups of pasta to your ziploc bag.
2. Next, add about 10-12 drops of food coloring and about 1 tbsp of vinegar. (You can use alcohol but I prefer to use vinegar so that it's safe for the preschoolers that decide to put it in their mouth.)
3. Close the ziploc and stir up the pasta to mix around the food coloring. You can let the noodles sit in the food coloring for a little while if you'd like a deeper color. (I didn't let mine sit and I am pleased with the color.)
4. Dump out your noodles onto wax paper and allow to dry. You can let it dry on newspaper but I used wax paper so that I don't have to worry about the wet noodles drying to the paper.
5. Let the noodles dry overnight. I made our pasta on Friday so that it would have plenty of time to dry over the weekend.

Money saving idea: To cut down on the number of baggies I used, I planned an order for dying my pasta so that I could reuse the bags. For example, I dyed yellow pasta and then used the bag to dye orange pasta. I knew that the orange would involve using the yellow and another color.

Construction Theme: The Three Little Pigs

One of our recent themes was construction. We used The Three Little Pigs as our main book for the week. Here are a few activities to go with the theme.

There are so many different versions of this story that I actually had a difficult time finding the original story. You could share the different versions with your class. Depending on their age and abilities, you could compare the differences.




We also read Our Tree House. This book talks about building a tree house and it shows the people working and building so we were able to point out the different tools and the purpose of the tools.

For our craft we made pigs. We used three circles for the body, head, and snout.

We have a blocks center in our classroom. We recently added some of the sturdy cardboard brick blocks to our collection.

My son had some toy tools at home so I borrowed them to take to school. They were a hit and they preschoolers have really enjoyed playing with the tools.


We are fortunate to have a nice manipulative center in our classroom which has many wooden puzzles.


I added some of these pig coloring pages in our art center that week as an optional activity. The kids could color and trace the word "pig". Other sources for printables: First School, Coloring.ws, Coloring Pages for Kids.

Other things we did during the week:
Read Humpty Dumpty
Sang the Humpty Dumpty song
Watched The Three Little Pigs from the Discovery Education website
We made The Three Little Pigs stick puppets. We used our puppets to retell the story.

Other activities to try:
Blow paint with a straw.
Pig craft (from paper towel roll)

Snowman Photo Keepsake

This snowman doesn't need much explanation. It is simply a snowman that kids can help cut and assemble. Then the teacher can add a photo of the child for the snowman's face.

Be sure to check out the other snowman ideas.

Heart People Craft

This week we're making heart people for our Valentine craft. We're also decorating our bulletin board with these cuties. The idea is very simple and I have seen it around for a while now so I am not sure where it originated.

As you can see, the body of the person is a large heart and the feet and hands are smaller hearts. We use strips of paper for the legs and arms. We folded them to give a crinkled effect. You could wiggle eyes or buttons for the eyes or you could hand draw them. We let the kids draw the mouth.

This is definitely an cute, easy, and inexpensive idea.