Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

This past spring after the Upper Peninsula Early Childhood Conference , I was given a wonderful book: Do-It-Yourself Early Learning by Jeff and Tasha Johnson . This book is fantastic! There are plans and suggestions for a variety of toys and activities that you can make yourself with very inexpensive materials. One of my favorite suggestion is to make a pvc pipe construction set. The book outlines various sizes of pipe to cut and a number of different types of connectors. Today, we used some of our set to make "A Bike Wash" (A similar suggestion for a car wash is outlined in the book. However, we did not opt to buy a different size pvc pipe for our version.) The children had a fantastic time cooling off and tinkering with the pipes. "What happens when you put your finger over the hole?" I'm fairly certain that the bikes only went through the wash once or twice.... The weather has been quite warm, and it was just as much fun to play with the "bik...

We have a rather large sandbox in our backyard. When it was first built, it took a HUGE dump truck to deliver 19 tons of sand to fill it. (I'm quite certain that we no longer have 19 tons in the sand box, because I have to have vacuumed at least one ton of it up as it has migrated inside ;0.) It is very tricky to build a sandbox on a hill. Our entire play yard is on a slope, and is at quite a steep angle in some areas. When we get a lot of rain (or melting snow) it causes our sand to pile up at the back edge of the sandbox. We could of course let it build up there and it will slowly slide through the cracks in our fence and end up in the parking lot below. I'm not so certain that the store located there would appreciate it all that much though. So, our mission over the past couple of days has been to remove all of the play equipment (slides and climbers) and to move the sand to even out our sandbox again. The shovels weren't really cutting it, so we decided to see how well...

Our exploration of pendulums continued today with a "monster" sized version of pendulum painting on our parking pad. We use a rather tall portable coat rack. (You can see in the photo, I'm about 5'2" tall, so we had a tall pendulum to work with today.) We also made sure that the string for the cup was long enough that our short friends could reach it when it was their turn. Instead of liquid tempera like we used yesterday, we opted to make some homemade sidewalk paint. I know that I saw this idea when it was posted on Teach Preschool, but I cannot remember who/where it came from. (If it was you, let me know and I'll give you the credit!) All you need to do is mix cornstarch with water and a little bit of food coloring. I found that it was about a 50/50 mix with a few drops of color. The beauty of this sidewalk paint is that it is all natural and biodegradable. We made a large batch and put it to the test with our "monster" pendulum. While we were wa...