Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

I've been messing around with the blog. If you haven't noticed, I'm horrible with tags. I guess that is why I have a "search this blog" button.  Hopefully you will be able to find what you are looking for even if I'm not very good at categorizing things! For a test with the new feeds and networked blog, I thought I would share another one of my favorite posts. I thought it was quite timely as I know a number of classrooms are currently observing their caterpillars! This is a repost from last summer when we studied the life cycle of butterflies for almost three months! After collecting monarch eggs, we will NEVER order a butterfly kit again. This post captures our monarchs via video both as they go and and come out of their chrysalid. If you would like to see another compilation video with a number of songs and other aspects of our study, click here. We woke to find 5 darkened chrysalid this morning. So far, 3 butterflies have emerged and we managed to c...

Excuse the mess.... I'm reorganizing/designing the blog.... All of the posts are still here, I'm far from done. Anticipate changes over the next few days!

My brain is still fried. I'm on the wrong week! I will be collaborating with an amazing group of bloggers for an upcycle/reuse challenge with cardboard boxes... but it isn't this week.... It is next week! So, come back next week for a fantastic collaboration coordinated by Rachelle over at Tinkerlab!   Now that life is a little bit less hectic, I also anticipate making some major changes on the blog. I'm looking for a little less clutter and rearranging things a bit. So, if you happen to stop back and things look different, I will be playing around with the layout for awhile until I find something that I like and works better for me! So, here is a quick run down of this week's What Would You Do With It? Wednesday (on Friday) Welcome to this week's edition of What Would You Do With It? Wednesday. This week we are featuring plastic Easter eggs! I know I am dreadfully behind on my Wednesday list, and if things work out with some collaboration in the next few we...

Today, we decided to craft some easy capes. If you are looking for some other fun cape ideas made with fabric, you might want to check out this link to the diary of a quilter for a super easy cape.   If you do a search for tutorials, you will find a wide variety of capes out there. We decided that we could make some capes out of plastic bags and duct tape. The children decorated their capes, but most of the taping was an adult project.  I did not prepare the capes in advance. I believe that crafting with children, even when it is more of an adult type product focused activity, the children need to see and be a part of the process. The value in a craft project for children and adults is learning and seeing the steps involved to make a product.  Children can learn the sequence of events. First, you put tape around all of the edges of the bag. Then you add tape to where the handles of the bag were. This will make the straps for the cape. We ma...

(If you are looking for my What Would You Do With It Wednesday post, stop back on Friday when I join forces with other bloggers for a weekly challenge using boxes this week!)   We've been having a fantastic time observing our baby chicks , but we have also started to talk about frogs. The children are very excited to observe frogs, and to see them hatch from eggs too. We have been hearing the frogs at night, but have yet to find any out and about.  Yesterday, before it started to rain too hard, we took a walk up the street to see if we could find any frogs in the pond near the cemetery.  We had fun playing with our nets and trying to dance between the rain drops, but we didn't see any frogs or frog eggs. When the rain started to pick up, we found out that trees make great umbrellas. We sat under the tree for awhile and watched the rain drops hit the pond.  Then, when the rain let up, we used our "real umbrella" and walked back. Today, we opted to take a wal...

If you have been following our blog, you know that we started chicken eggs in our incubator awhile back. Unfortunately, we did not have any luck hatching our little chicks. (We will try again soon.) Fortunately, my dad still raises chicks and when we went for a visit this past weekend we were able to borrow a few chicks from the farm for a few weeks to watch. Baby chicks are quite amusing, I've found myself parked in front of their brooder box for quite some time. The children have been enjoying their company too. Here is what they have to say: "Baby chicks are pretty cool" "They can jump"  "They put their feet up like an ostrich and a flamingo" "They put their feet in their food and water a lot"  "They sleep when they are standing up. When they start to sleep standing up they fall down a little bit and then they wake up." "One of our chickens is really mean and he tries to jump out"  "One of the chickens tries to...

I attended an AMAZING workshop while I was at the MIAEYC conference in Grand Rapids. The presenters shared all kinds of great ideas for sprucing up your science activities. (I'm sure I will be referring back to this workshop for quite some time.) What I really loved about it was that the presenters had so many photos and activities that are simple and are easily integrated into any setting. (I apologize for the poor photos to start. Unfortunately, my camera did not like the lighting in the presentation room, so my photos from Grand Rapids did not turn out well at all.) Basically, you take 3 cardboard boxes, cut round holes in them to make homes for your "tree critters", paint them and hook them together.  At the workshop, I was told that they tried a variety of different things as branches, but what worked the best was to use actual branches/sticks.  We drew our circles and used a box cutter to carve out our circles.  We decided to use brown, green, and black ...