Coming back from "vacation" may be hard for some people, but around here we get creative with a Pasta Play Day. It's just as it sounds: pasta all day in every way. The kids pretended to cook spaghetti on the patio, played with it in the water table, read books about eating spaghetti, and even ate spaghetti and meatballs for lunch!
The set up on the patio included the play table from the living room being brought outside, the little kitchen, little grill, chairs, and a shelves tipped upside down for another play surface.
Orange spaghetti for "cooking."
Multi-colored pasta in the water table. I cooked each pasta to different consistencies, ranging from super mushy to halfway hard. They didn't love playing in this as much as I thought and within minutes the kids took it out of the water table and carried it up to the patio for "cooking" with the spaghetti.
Some kids enjoyed eating the pasta, despite giving them warnings against it.
Pasta Day required spaghetti and meatballs for lunch (although most of the kids didn't want meatballs on their spaghetti). One of their favorite and messiest meals to date.
After naps the kids did spaghetti painting. I tried something new with the noodles this time around. I took Elizabeth's hair ties (they're nice and small), tied it around dried spaghetti, then submerged the spaghetti "brushes" in water for 5 hours. They were the perfect consistency for painting with!
The kids had a great day with all of the pasta play, however it was a BIG mess to clean up. Pasta got smashed into the cement on the patio, got tracked across the yard, and got crunched beneath feet. We were able to sweep some of it away once it dried out a bit (think later than 11 p.m. that night). Five days later and it's still caked on and smashed into our patio until a good rainfall happens.
Another successful theme day in the books!
