Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

  Did you notice that the blog looks a bit different? I've been busy, working to move our blog and website. Revamping and getting ready to celebrate the changes coming in the new year! This is my first post from the new platform, a test post of sorts as I learn to navigate and use Wordpress. I hope that our new site will be fully up and running in January, until then, bear with me as I work through the changes and glitches. Now, on to today's post.  This morning- we made Christmas Clay Dough! This is one of my favorite recipes for clay, a very different texture from traditional play dough. You may remember that I have posted about this before. (We made Clay Dough ornaments last year). To make our dough for crafting this year I adapted the recipe just a bit: 2 c. baking soda 1 c. corn starch 1 1/2 c. water peppermint extract (optional) food coloring (optional) Put all of the ingredients in a saucepan, stir constantly on medium heat until the dough becomes the consistency of mash...

I have so many different recipes for home made art supplies. This is one of my favorite for an air drying clay. I like it better than salt dough, and we have used it to make all kinds of sculptures, beads, and ornaments in the past.  This year, we have been making ornaments for the 4C of the UP, Great Start Regional Child Care Resource Center's Christmas Tree. The clay is a lot of fun to play with. most of the children were more interested in playing with the clay rather than sculpting with it.... So we played..... we rolled it, and we squished it.... and then when the children didn't want to play any more... I molded the dough into round shapes. roll the clay into a ball squish the ball with a cup You will have an almost perfect circle.... to make it perfect, I used the other side of the cup like a cookie cutter. Then you will get a circle that has a small ridge I used a straw to make a round hole in each circle ornament This clay will air dry quite nicely. I wanted to spee...

It is Strawberry Season! We are very fortunate to have a family connection to the Crane Berry Farm in Chassell. The children love to help us with the berries. They help to wash them and to cut them for freezing or baking. One of my little friends just can't get enough when it comes to cutting berries. She has been cutting, and cutting, and cutting. This is real work for little hands. Armed with a cutting board and a butter knife she has been cutting off the "green parts" from the "red parts" or the stem from the berries. Today, we took the activity a bit further and made up a batch of strawberry freezer jam. We added 1 1/2 cups of sugar and one package of pectin. It is important to mix the sugar and the pectin well before adding the berries. In a separate bowl, we mashed our berries with a meat tenderizer. We like our jam to have big chunks of berries, so we only mashed them up a little bit. Then we added 6 heaping cups of berries to our pectin...

   Back in April, Rachel from over at Quirky Mamma shared this wonderful recipe for fizzing sidewalk paint . I bookmarked it in tumblr , and waited for clear sidewalks and the perfect time to try it out. The children didn't realize that the sidewalk paint this week was different. We routinely use cornstarch, food coloring, and water to paint our sidewalk. The real fun came with the spray bottles filled with vinegar! The children had a fantastic time spraying their creations and watching the bubbles and fizz. Paint, spray, paint, spray....   I wonder what will happen if we dump the vinegar into the paint before we brush it on the sidewalk???  I love that the children are so curious and develop their own experiments no matter what we are doing.  Lots of bubbling and fizzing in this paint! An added bonus to using the vinegar on the sidewalk is that it helps prevent and remove weeds from growing in the sidewalk cracks! (I le...

If you remember, awhile back we opted to test out a couple of slime recipes to determine which one we liked best. (If you missed it, you can read about it here: The Great Slime Off) . Today, we decided to test a few stove top slime recipes to decide which one makes the best slime. Contestant/Slime Number One: Fiber Slime 6 c water 6 tsp Metamucil Fiber Mix ingredients in a large saucepan. Cook on high heat, bring to a rolling boil. Boil for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and place in a bowl. Stir occasionally as the slime cools. Cool completely prior to children's use.  Contestant/Slime Number Two: Super Sweet Slime  I found this great recipe over at Habeebee Homeschooling. 1- 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk 1 TBSP cornstarch 10-15 drops of food coloring Mix the sweetened condensed milk and cornstarch in a saucepan. Stirring constantly, cook on low heat. The mixture will thin as it is heated and then begin to thicken again. When it begins to thicken remove from heat. (...

Fairy Dust Teaching shared a great post on making moon sand the other day , and I realized that we had not made any of ours in a long time! So, today..... We made some!  We started with cornstarch.  Then we added about 1 1/2 times of the colored sand. It is not an exact science, but you don't want to end up with too much more sand than cornstarch. It is the cornstarch that gives the sand it's unique moon sand qualities!  Fairy Dust Teaching uses water, we like to use oil instead. With two boxes of cornstarch and an equal amount of sand, we use about 2 smaller bottles of baby oil. (Most of the time!) Today, I noticed that we were out of baby oil! So, instead, we used some old tanning oil and added vegetable oil until we achieved the right consistency. (I asked the children if they wanted to try the new recipe, but they didn't want to try it today!)  Moon sand is great because it is like a sand, but when you mold it, it keeps the shape.  So, n...

We had a great day filled with Seussical things! It started off with Ms. Amy "leaving" for the day and Thing One taking over. Unfortunately the Thing One hair was dreadfully warm and Thing One was not able to stay with us for the whole day, but she kept popping in and out. I don't usually try to cram so many different things into one post, but I thought I would give it a try for our day full of Seuss! Although, I am going to primarily show you our fun food for the day! We focused most of our day around 3 Dr. Seuss books:   Before breakfast, we read "The Cat in the Hat." Then, we decided to have a Hat themed breakfast. We cut some bananas and strawberries into slices, Then we stacked them in an AB pattern to make a wonderful  "hat for a cat!"  In my search for fun Seuss activities, I saw a lot of hats, but most of them were not very nutritious, so I thought of this one on my own ;). We added some bagels and milk for a gr...