Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

One of my favorite quotes (I use this along with my signature in email correspondence) comes from the Bee Movie: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Bee's wings are too short and their bodies are too round to make getting airborne very likely..... Bees, ofcourse, fly anyway, because... BEES DON'T CARE WHAT HUMANS THINK IS IMPOSSIBLE." ~ Bee Movie I'd like to consider myself a "bee" most of the time. Much of my continued inspiration for believing in impossible things comes from the children I work with. Young children view the world as limitless, anything is possible. As my blogger friend Scott recently posted, children don't make the assumptions that some of us grown ups do. They stretch and test the limits, their creativity and ingenuity is not confined by a set of rules "true or not." (Scott really has a great post about questioning your assumptions over at Brick by B...

This fall, we have been participating in a post card exchange that was organized by Teach Preschool on Facebook . In order to participate, we needed to send postcards about our hometown/state to a number of other preschools/daycares/homeschools around the country and in some cases around the world. We spent some time learning about where we live, and now we are having a great time learning about all of the places where our new postcard friends live. We opted not to post a map and mark it on the wall, as this is an ongoing project that will last at least 6 weeks. Instead, we are using our large U.S.A. Map floor puzzle when we read our postcards. This way, the children have the opportunity to start learning the shapes of the states and where they belong. This puzzle has been a favorite for quite some time and our older 3s and 4s have no trouble getting started with it. They can even recognize places they are familiar with. I love to sit and watch as the younger children's learni...

I have never been a fan of "cookie cutter" projects. I do understand value in children understanding how to follow directions, but I also try to make sure that even with the craft projects we do, children have lots of choices in order to use their own creativity. I always think more about this concept when it is nearing Halloween. One of my undergraduate professor's at Northern Michigan University always used the example of Halloween pumpkins/Jack-o-lanterns as a very common cookie cutter project. I even remember one year a group of students covering the door to her office with identical looking paper cut-outs. I don't think a year has gone by where I have not thought about her and the cookie cutter pumpkins this time of year. Art of course, it about the process, it is an opportunity to learn through exploration of materials and to find your own personal way to express yourself. There are no rules, no limits..... in art, anything is possible. In art, pumpkins can b...

We started with a table top covered in shaving cream!!! (I found a nice raspberry scented cream this time, so instead of smelling like a "truck stop" our hands smell nice and fruity!) We played and sculpted until we didn't want to play anymore, and then..... We added school glue. We mixed the glue and the shaving cream together to make puffy paint. Each child made their own paint and added it to black paper. Making wonderful Halloween Ghosts! We decided our ghosts needed eyes and opted for googly ones this time! This post was linked up to:

Life has been good, but very busy. We've been doing great things, but often, we have been just to busy for me to blog about it! Today, Dane and I decided to work on some Lego Science. He is all about school work when it involves Legos. Here is the chart we used. First he made 4 different LEGO vehicles, all of his own creations. He named them and I printed a blank chart with the photos of each creation. Then as we worked, he filled in the chart with pencil. (Later, I had him transfer his findings to the computer. This also gave him the opportunity to work on his typing.) We made lot of predictions/estimations. We used a digital postage scale to weigh the creations in grams. We used an online stopwatch to time our racers. Each racer went down the ramp independently. We noticed right away that our ramp was too steep and we lowered it considerably. We did decide that it could be much better if our ramp was much longer. (We will be picking up a longer board when we are out and about ...

Today, we decided to sew some "pumpkins." If you haven't already noticed, I'm a collector of "stuff." Things that other folks might throw out, I find a use for one way or another. One of the things I have been collecting for quite some time are embroidery hoops. We use the big ones when we make homemade paper. The little ones are put to use in a variety of different ways, today we used them to help us make "pumpkins." I found some remnant of a rubbery shelf liner that we used as our canvas. We put it into the hoops and cut off the excess. (This part was kind of tricky for most of our little friends. It required quite a bit of extra help. You could potentially do this part prior to working with the children.) The only reason we used shelf liner is because I saw some remnants sitting on a shelf in our craft closet. You could use different types of fabric or canvas. I do recommend using something with holes until your little ones have mastered t...