Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

Signs of spring are all around us. In between all of the mounds of snow we are finding lovely puddles of slush... and more and more mud!  The yard is very wet, and the sun feels fantastic!  We are in the time of year where the weather can change with the drop of a hat! Right now, it is a great reminder of living in the moment and appreciating what we have right here, right now.  With some of the recent posts on pendulum painting ( Teacher Tom , Tinker Lab's Funnel Painting ) , I thought it would be great to try out painting the snow with a pendulum. Rather than trying to rig up a pvc pipe system, we opted to use our play structure and hang our pendulum from where the swings will return when the fall zone is no longer full of ice and snow. The children had a great time adding some more color to our patches of white! We used a mixture of Kool-Aid powder and water to make our "paint."  The rainbow colors and fruity smells were delightful! We...

What does plethora mean? A plethora is A LOT. It means that there are TONS AND TONS AND TONS of something. We have been building and exploring with our pvc pipe set every day over the past couple of weeks. As you can see, we used some of the pipe to make a table with our storage container. We have discovered that you can send sound through the pipes. One friend talks on one end while another friend listens on the opposite end. We have also discovered that little marbles fit into the track. We can build long and interesting configurations. If the marble does not travel all by itself, sometimes we need to blow some air into the pipe to send it all the way through. Sometimes, we just connect and build, just to see what we might end up with. Sometimes, we have a definite plan. Ms. Amy, I made an "X" Look, I made giant scissors! We found a pattern for these at Family Fun : We also continued our exploration in the block area with these pendulums. We found inspiration from Teacher ...

Our outdoor area is going through a HUGE transformation. If you remember from last week, we moved all of the equipment off of the sandbox . This was for a couple of reasons. First, we needed to shift the sand. Secondly, we have been having a problem with some wasps trying to build their homes in the climber. So, we have opted to keep the equipment stored away for awhile and utilize our open sand area! One great idea I found while reading comments on Teacher Tom's blog about pendulum painting was that Sherry and Donna from Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning had used the pendulum with sand. What a brilliant idea! So, we moved our giant pendulum to the sand pit! (Along with our sensory salts and some colored sand. We used our salts for quite some time inside, and rather than throwing the salt out, we used it in the sandbox). As you can see, the use of the pendulum in the sandbox prompted great teamwork. The patterns the sand and salt made were not as evident, but this a...

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...

I am continually inspired by the amazing work that great teachers (in and outside of the classroom) and creative little minds have been doing! One of the things I have been meaning to try for quite some time is pendulum painting. I first saw this ingenious idea when it was posted by Deborah Stewart on the Teach Preschool wall on Facebook. The author of the blog, Teacher Tom, continues to inspire and create! We of course, had our own versions of pendulum painting.... For our first attempt, we used a tall metal clothing rack and a rather large section of roll paper. We determined that this option would be much too difficult for our shorter friends, and we would need A LOT of paper. So, we tried a few group projects with the tall one. Then, we tried something different: We used a shorter portable clothes rack. The wind was not helping us tody, so we needed to use some of our larger rocks and stepping stones to help hold the paper down. We realized quite quickly that the paint was pouri...