Process Art: Painting on Pasta

If you looked in my cart at the grocery store, you might be mistaken in thinking that our family REALLY loves Italian food. In fact, what we really love is using pasta for crafts. It’s such a cheap and versatile product and you will generally find a bag or two stored with all of our craft supplies. In fact, if you take a sneak peek in most preschool classes, I’m sure you’ll find lots of it there, too! It helps that it comes in so many different shapes and is perfect for process art projects.

Today, we are using the pasta for some process art and are going to glue and paint it. This is a very simple activity to plan and set up, and it’s one that the children really love. This activity was completed with 3 and 4-year-olds, but it really works for any age group. The older the children, the more involved their picture will be. With the younger age group, the gluing is a lot more random!

What you need:

• A variety of pasta (we used penne, small shells and some dinosaur shaped pasta)
• Containers for the pasta
• Good quality PVA glue. You really do need good glue, or the pasta won’t stick to the paper
• Construction paper or cardboard (we used black and white, but any color will do)
• Poster Paint
• Paint Brushes

What to do:

1. Place the different pasta into the containers
2. Put the glue into a container – it’s easier to apply it with a paintbrush than it is out of the bottle
3. Have the children glue the pasta all over their piece of paper or cardboard. You can encourage patterns or shapes if you like, but I let them stick them wherever they wanted

4.Wait for the glue to dry (this takes about 20 minutes)

5.Set up the paints and let them paint their pasta

6.Leave the paintings flat until they dry, then they should be fine to hang up on display

This is definitely a process over product type of craft activity, but it’s a process art activity that toddlers and pre-schoolers will really enjoy, and can do independently (with supervision of course!). We kept the pasta and paints out for a few days and it was an activity that the children came back to over and over again.

 

Contributing Author:

Carol Jones is an Australian elementary and special education teacher. She is also a mother of two who loves engaging in creative and messy play! You can find her over at My Bored Toddler, where she shares lots of simple, hands-on activities for toddlers.