Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

A couple of years ago- I saw this great post from The Chocolate Muffin Tree about bubble prints.  When they did this activity, they used colored bubbles.  I thought, we could try it by coloring our own bubbles with paint. Just so you know, it does take a bit of tinkering to get a good mixture together that will be successful.  We did attempt a few prints with food coloring in the bubbles-  and we did make some of our own "bubble" with dish soap. We did find that we have GREAT dishsoap- so great in fact that it was fabulous at taking care of the color we added with the paint or food coloring. Thus- it was not good for making prints...  However- the best option was to use store bought bubble solution and liquid tempera. (We have since done this with liquid watercolor and food coloring. I would recommend using either of the paints over the food coloring in order to have a nice print) The children absolutely loved this activity...

As I was going through photos today, I ran across a number of picture sets of things that I had intended to blog about a LONG time ago. When life gets crazy, the blog is typically the first thing to go.  Now that I am reorganizing and rethinking things, I thought I would pull a couple of those "someday" posts together for you. (For those of you who have children in care, you will notice that these photos are almost a year old- but that's okay) Last summer- we had a couple of great days of warm, summer rain. It wasn't raining really hard- gently, just slightly more than a sprinkle... So we decided that we would create some paintings and bring them outside in the rain.  In order to keep the paper from tearing- and for the process to work best, we opted to use pieces of freezer paper to paint on. We also used a combination of tempera and watercolor paints, being water soluble- the rain could have an impact on the painting.  We spent so...

   Those of you who have been following the blog for some time know that we tend to offer art activities  closer to the process end of the spectrum most of the time. (Sometimes we do craft.....) I saw a great activity on Pinterest where the art students drew with permanent markers and then used watercolor paints to color over the drawing - the process was fantastic- and the product looks AMAZING too! (Note- the pin I found was used with much older children and I did not wish to give as much direction,- but I liked the idea of mixing the two medias).  So, I set out some markers and freshly made homemade watercolors. (You can find the recipe for those in this post- we make ours with Kool-Aid so that they are vibrant and scented! AND YES- they do bubble like crazy when you make them. It is the reaction of the acids and bases you are mixing)     Like any of our projects- I staged the environment by providing specific materials for th...