Playdough Pasta Matching Game

I love to put creative combinations of materials together and see what the kids come up with. This week we’ve paired up play dough and some pasta – and the children made up their own game! The play dough is home made, using this easy no cook play dough recipe. Play dough is so versatile and we always have at least one color or flavor available to play with. We used this same dough for some super sensory play dough mandalas last time we played but today the children have been using it to explore shapes in a play dough matching game.

Make a Playdough Pasta Matching Game

We’d put together an assortment of pasta shapes from our store cupboard and dyed them using food coloring. There are different ways to do this but we simply pop the pasta in a zip-lock bag with a few drops of liquid food coloring and give it all a good shake and mix. Once the pasta pieces are evenly coated in the color we lay the shapes out on baking trays and leave them overnight to dry.  The pasta can be stored away in a clean zip-lock bag when you’ve finished playing with it, and brought out again for lots of different play times. This game needs an interesting mix of pasta shapes, so see what you can find. We included cartwheels, tubes and bow ties. The children rolled out some of the play dough with a rolling pin and then made patterns with the pasta. They used the ends and sides of the pasta to explore the variety of patterns they could make. We talked about the different shapes and counted how many of each type we had. We carefully took out all the pasta pieces, leaving behind some lovely prints. Then for the challenge! Could we match the shapes back up? It was like a 3-D pasta play dough jigsaw, pairing up the shapes and orienting the pasta correctly to get an exact match again. This is a game you can play in a one-to-one pair with your child but also fun with a group. Each child can make a pasta print picture and then you can all swap places and see if you can match up the pasta with someone else’s design. How have you been playing with playdough this week?

The Quirky Mommas have a few more playdough ideas for you:

• Playdough Learning: Prewriting for Toddlers
• Play Dough and Stencils
• Play Dough Recipe
• Check out our preschool file folder matching games!