Making Pasta Necklaces with Toddlers

These pasta necklaces all began with my worst nightmare. I was getting into our pantry the other day (which does double duty as our craft closet), and I somehow knocked over a rather large container of glitter. Moreover, the screw top was turned to open and green glitter came spilling down from the top shelves. It went everywhere and all over everything.

You know how sometimes something happens and you feel like it’s happening in slow motion? Yea, it was like that. And once it started there was nothing I could do to stop it.

There was glitter on all the shelves, on boxes of pasta and cereal, and a whole lot of glitter all over the floor.

I just couldn’t bring myself to take a picture of it. (Yes, it was so traumatizing that short of writing this post I never want to remember it).

It was like a green sparkling waterfall cascading down from the top of my closet. Mr. C was standing right next to me when it happened. I can’t even remember why I had gotten in the closet in the first place. The look of awe that came across his face probably rivaled the look of horror that spread across mine. “Oh Wow!” I heard him exclaim rather enthusiastically, mouth popped open & eyes wide. I on the other hand, wanted to cry. I took a deep breath, shut the door and simply walked away.

Eventually I came to grips with the fact that I had to clean up the mess. In doing so, I discovered that some of the boxes of pasta were in fact open which of course meant heaping piles of glitter had gone right in. Rather than toss them, they became our afternoon project. We colored them.

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If you have never colored pasta I highly recommend it.

We use liquid water colors and the results are so vibrant! I actually just wrote a post for Little Pnuts‘ blog on how to color pasta so rather than rehash the whole thing here I ‘ll just send you over there. If you want the directions for how we color our pasta click here. (The link will open in a separate window for you so you can easily read it now or later and not loose your place here).

I let C pick the colors. We ended up with purple and green and decided to make what is seemingly a childhood classic. Pasta necklaces. (I can’t believe I haven’t blogged about this before).

Making pasta necklaces is great fine motor skills practice!

You can string your pasta on any cord like material. Even yarn will do. I find the key to successful necklace making for little ones is to tape one end of the cord down thus preventing them from stringing their material right through to the point where it comes off the other end. Trust, me it cuts back on the 2 yr old frustration.

Another thing to consider when making pasta necklaces with toddlers is your choice of pasta. It might sound silly but it matters. Straighter pastas with wider openings like ziti, rigatoni, or pene will work much better than something like elbow macaroni. Of course in the end it entirely depends on your individual child and what they are capable of but it is something to keep in mind.