Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

I recently finished a post about our Pictured Rock Inspired Paintings , and have been asked to share more of our photos of this beautiful place! If you ever decide to visit, know that it is important to make sure that you see the lakeshore from the water. The views are spectacular. I don't want this post to run-on forever with photos, but it is what you asked for! I'm giving you a glimpse, as we took a couple of hundred during the two hour boat trip! In all honesty, the photos turned out great, but they do not even come close to the experience of seeing the rocks in person.

We live approximately 45 minutes away from Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore . We have lived here for 9 years, and it has taken us nine years to venture to this natural beauty nearly in our backyard. I don't anticipate that it will take that long for us to journey back. While on vacation, we learned that the beautiful colors that make the pictures on the rocks come from ground water that is filled with various minerals. When the water runs over the rocks, it colors them in a variety of colors contingent upon which minerals it contains. The rocks themselves have very little color to them. Although the children in our care have not all been to the Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore, we talked a lot about our vacation and shared photos with them. (I do think a field trip may be in order for some of our older children, as they were quite facinated by the photographs). We decided to try our own luck with running colors down paper to make our own beautiful paintings. We used a mixture o...