Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

"Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver Our definition of "wild" is most likely far different than most. I plan to offer you a glimpse into our "wild" and precious weekends. (And perhaps get a blog hop going in the near future to allow those of you who share our definition of a family friendly wild weekend to share in your adventures! I just need to learn how to make it all work!)

This morning, we broke out the pipe cleaners/chenille stems. We store them in a bucket when we put them away, so they are usually a "wild heap" when we take them out. The children love exploring with these inexpensive, bendy, and fuzzy material. As you can see from the photos, they manipulate the stems with their fingers. Can you also see how much they are using thier minds? Look at the expressions on their faces, you can almost feel the thought process and concentration involved. "Can you take a picture of all three together?" (Of course I grabbed the camera immediately!) Activities like this one are a great way for children to work on their fine motor skills and enjoy creating "cool stuff." (as stolen/borrowed from Teacher Tom.) Not only is it important for them to have the opportunity to make these cool things, but it also a great jumping point to work on language development and telling a story. After our time creating, I asked each child to select ...

Most of our art materials are always "open" and available for the children to use. The scrap bucket of paper is usually raided quite frequently, and I like to make sure that there are plenty of "standard" shapes cut for the children to use. Of course, we encourage lots of cutting of their own shapes, but sometimes it is nice to have just the right shape without having to cut it. Today- I hid all of the pre-cut shapes and replaced that basket with paper punches instead! Some of the punches required the children to push down, while others required them to squeeze. This was a challenging activity that required them to use their small/fine motor skills. For some of the younger children, assistance was required to add the necessary pressure. (I didn't help them until they had exhausted their own techniques and they asked for my assistance). The "squeeze" punches were used much more frequently than the standard push punches. The children were giggling an...

This is a photo of a milkweed plant. In June, I asked my dad if he thought that they had any growing on their 40-acre farm. I wanted to have a place to gather some for food in the case that we were able to get some monarch caterpillars from a friend of mine. When I finally took the time to look up milkweed plants, I came to realize that I've been killing milkweed all summer long. It keeps sprouting up in my flower beds and I have been pulling those weeds!!! GAAAAAAAAACKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK! Live and learn, I guess. Fortunately, my darling hubby thought that they looked pretty cool and let a patch of them grow near our shed and near one of the liloc bushes. Now, we don't need to have someone bring us monarch caterpillars, we have been able to find our own! Here is Dane pointing to a tiny little egg sitting on the back of this leaf. We gathered some eggs and some tiny little caterpillars to watch them transform with all of the children. Most of them are quite small. The largest one f...

If you have been following our blog, you know that we are in the middle of our yearly stepping stones project. Each year, each child that is enrolled in our care has the opportunity to create a decorative stepping stone for display in our outdoor rock garden. We have become known for our display and the children look forward to creating their own stepping stone each year. Many people make stepping stones by purchasing kits from craft stores. We have found that option to be okay if you only plan on making a single stone, but if you would like to make more stones, there is a much more economical way to do so! We make our stones with Portland Cement that is mixed with play sand. You can find Portland Cement at nearly all do-it-yourself type stores. This makes very smooth stones. You can use a variety of sand, we always use the sand that has previoiusly been part of our indoor sensory tables. (After we have used the sand indoors we either use it in stones or move it outside. Most of the...

One of my favorite activities to do in the warmer months is recycling paper. We save all of the unclaimed art and scraps of paper from other projects in a big tote. When we have a large amount, we fill the sensory table with scraps of paper and scissors. This first stage of the process often takes a day or so. The children are given the opportunity to come and go, cutting and ripping whenever they choose. (Some people use a paper shredder if their goal is make homemade paper. We try to do our without the aid of electrical tools.) In order to make great paper, it is necessary to cut the paper into tiny pieces. The smaller the better. This give the children ample opportunity to work with scissors and to tear paper which is very important to building their fine motor skills. We cut and we tore, and we cut and we tore... (You will notice that the majority of the paper is white. We usually reuse our colored scraps for other projects adding only a small amount into our recyclin...

"Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver Our definition of "wild" is most likely far different than most. I plan to offer you a glimpse into our "wild" and precious weekends. (And perhaps get a blog hop going in the near future to allow those of you who share our definition of a family friendly wild weekend to share in your adventures! I just need to learn how to make it all work!)