Sensory Painting with Pasta and Edible Paint

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When working with a sensory group with food aversions, I needed to make the activities fun as well as give exposure to some of the sensations that go along with food. I wanted to have the food textures, smells and tastes available while making the activity about creating and not about eating. I chose cooked pasta as the painting tools/paint brushes. Then I made edible paint using plain yogurt with Kool-aid added for the color, flavor, and smell.

We made undersea pictures, and used parmesan cheese to resemble the sandy ocean floor. The candy swedish fish were used as stamps to stamp the fish onto the paper, and we used real seaweed from the grocery store to tear up into seaweed shapes and stick onto our paper.

This activity was a great tool to help with tolerance of scents and textures. Our finished pictures turned out pretty cool too. I did need to use some extra food coloring in some of the yogurt paint to get some extra variety of colors since the Kool-aid colors I found were limited. The kids did taste most of the paint to see what flavor they were, and tolerated using the pasta as painting tools.

This is an activity that I will incorporate frequently into the sensory based feeding group, and will change it up as to the types of pictures that we make, and the flavors of the paints we use.