4th of July Patriotic Messy Noodles Sensory Play

I made this last year and am not able to find a picture of just the bin set up before the kids got into! I appoligize, but I think you'll still get this gist from these!

So, cooked angel hair pasta is a wonderfully messy sensory play activity and it can be turned patriotic which makes it perfect for the 4th of July tomorrow!

It's really easy to make too.

Step 1:
Cook an entire box of angel hair pasta.

Step 2:
Drain it, and let it cool a little bit. You don't have to wait until it's completely cooled though.

Step 3:
Divide it into three sections for your red, "white" and blue.

Step 4:
Get out 2 gallon size Ziploc bags. Add one section of your cooked pasta to one bag, and another to the other. These will become your red and your blue.

Step 5:
Add in a little bit of vegetable oil to each bag mix it around a bit to coat the noodles. Then squirt in quite a few drops of red food coloring into the first bag and zip it up and shake/squeeze the bag all around to coat all the noodles with color. This part is fun to have little ones help with! Repeat with blue food coloring for the next bag.

Step 6:
On separate pieces of foil paper, laid out in a sunny spot, put the colored pasta to dry.

Step 7:
Once dry put in the bin in a red, white and blue order.

Step 8:
Let the kids play with it and watch them be amazed and have so much fun!

4th of July Patriotic Sensory Dough

Here's an awesome, easy to make, fun to play with sensory dough for the kids to play with on the 4th of July. If you bring this to a party where children will be playing, it's sure to be a hit! I did last year and it was loved by many!

You'll need:

- A big box of baking soda

- A packet of cherry Koolaid

- A packet of ice blue raspberry lemonade Koolaid

- Dry pasta, I used rigatoni 

- A bin

- Another bin, because kids like to transfer!

It's really simple to make. All you have to do is pour the baking soda into your bin until you've reached the desired amount that you think you'll be needing for the kids to play with. Then you SLOWLY add water and mix around with your hand until it becomes moldable but still crumbly. If you add to much water it will quickly become all liquid. Next, separate it into thirds. Put one third in one bowl, another third in another bowl, and you can leave one third in the bin since it is staying white, but you'll want that third in the middle. (the picture shows what I'm talking about). 

Pour the packet of cherry Koolaid into one of the bowls of sensory dough and mix it in until it's all colored. Repeat this process with the ice blue raspberry lemonade Koolaid packet and the other bowl of sensory dough. Then add both doughs back into the bin, in the red, white and blue order.

Now, you can omit the hard, colored pasta if you want, but I think it makes it funner and cuter as well as adds more texture elements for more sensory play. All you have to do is put some of the dry pasta into a ziploc bag, add in a little bit of vinegar or alcohol, shake it around so they're coated, then add in a few drops of food coloring and shake it all around again until all colored. Then lay them on a paper towel to dry for a little while. You'll obviously use two separate plastic bags to make the colored pastas, and red food coloring for one, and blue food coloring for the other. Once they're dry lay the red pasta on top of the red dough, and the blue pasta on top of the blue dough. I overlapped into the white a bit, because that's the look I liked!

Patriotic One to One Correspondence Activity

I set this activity up for Charlie for Memorial Day, sorry I didn't post it sooner..but you'll still be able to use it for anytime, and all the other patriotic holidays to come, like 4th of July!

I just adore activities that totally fit in with holiday or unit themes and this one did exactly that, as well as helped my daughter gain knowledge. Best of both worlds!

You'll need:
- A blue ice cube tray (preferably with star shaped sections like ours, just to be more patriotic)
- Red pom poms.

One to one correspondence is about one object fitting in one space. So for this activity, it was one pom pom fitting in one ice cube tray space. So my daughter placed each pom pom in a different star section.
This was great for fine motor skills too. Could use fingers or tweezers/tiny tongs. We had just done an activity with tiny tongs before this, so she went for her fingers.

Patriotic Process Art

Looking to get your kiddo covered in paint like this? You've came to the right place! We love process art here, and we created a great one for the 4th of July last year.

The way it looks above is not the finished product, it got so much more added to it the colors started mixing and almost looked a little purple in some spots, but we made sure they didn't mix too much. After all, it was supposed to be Patriotic, and there's no purple on the flag!

All you need is a white poster board, and red and blue washable tempera paints.

The idea is to let your little one squirt the paint on the poster board, and walk/hop/skip/run/crawl all through it. They can get a new sensory experience by squishing the paint around with their toes. You can talk about why red, white and blue are patriotic colors. Most importantly, it gets kids up and moving and creates a wonderful work of art when it's all said and done.

Note: Doing this outside like we did will help minimize the mess. It's also handy to have wet wipes nearby and possibly towels ready in the bathroom for a quick rinse off.