Sensory Activity for One Year Old's

Whenever I search online for crafty, sensory of fun activities for one year old's, I often keep finding the same limited options over and over again - finger painting, painting with sponges, water painting, painting, painting, and more painting. Then there's the occasional oats or rice sensory bins and so forth. Honestly, I was finding unique options challenging to find or come up with on my own.

I stumbled across this lovely blog on Pinterest titled "35 Activities for 18 Month Old's and Younger." Honestly I was expecting the same old same old that I've been pinning regarding young toddler activities - more painting, more rice, more bins. I was pleasently surprised as I started exploring this blog. Yes, under the art section, you'll see plenty of the same old finger paint business I was talking about. However, there is also a section called "Sensory Play," "Imaginative Play," "Motor Skills," and "Explore." I'm hooked already.

I literally found this blog this morning and have looked over all the different activities and decided to try one. Today we did the Spaghetti Sensory play. It was a hit! However I changed my process of making the spaghetti ever so slightly to hopefully make for a less messy experience.

Here is the blogs suggestion for making the spaghetti for the sensory play activity: Cook the paste al dente according to the package; prepare zip lock bags for spaghetti dying by mixing some oil and food coloring in the bag (no measurements were provided); split up the cooked paste between the bags and mix well; rinse the pasta.

To me it seemed as though the oil would make this activity pretty messy to clean up as oil isn't my favorite substance to try and get off of, well, anything. So I substituted the oil for water. I did everything the same except I added a few tablespoons (2-3) of water to each bag with the food coloring. No oil. I allowed the pasta to sit in the color water mixture for a couple minutes. The longer you allow the pasta to sit in the dye, the darker they will become.

I'm glad that I decided to put Canden in some old clothes and go outside for this. Although the picture on the blog shows a little girl in what appears to be nice clothing and indoors, this was surprisingly more messy of a project than I thought it would be. I don't know if the oil in the original recipe was present to help the noodles be more slippery, therefore, wouldn't chunk off noodle and color...??? I don't know. I figured it was kind of a trade off - either a baby covered in oil, or a baby covered in noodle bits. Also, the noodles definitely stained the sidewalk. Luckily, his clothes weren't really affected, even though we were wearing old clothes for this.

I hope you enjoy this activity as much as we did. We will be trying more activities soon!