Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

If you're looking for "What Would You Do With It? Wednesday" Don't worry.... I'm bringing it back with a great line up of wonderful guest postings! We will kick it off in September with Deborah Stewart of Teach Preschool!!! ! She will be sharing some great ideas with clothespins! So, get your ideas together to link up! If you are interested in writing a featured guest post, check out this post for more information. Today, I thought I would share our "field journals" with you.  With all of the back to school buzz here in the states, you can get some great deals on supplies right now. A couple of weeks ago, I found composition books for $0.40 each! So, of course, I stocked up on them! I thought that giving each child a journal to write in whenever they wanted would be a great way for them to work on their pre-writing/writing skills. They have access to them all of the time and have the opportunity to document whatever they choose. Sometimes...

While I was gone to the conference this past weekend , Allan and Dane built an "OGRE" catapult. (Well, their own version of one.) We have been trying all kinds of different experiences where Dane can either "blow things up" or send thing flying in the air. ( Here is a link to one of our catapult projects ) This evening, we opted to try some predicting with the latest model of a catapult. First, we tried to decide how far we thought the sponge bombs would fly. We wrote our predictions down. Then, it was time to.... Ready, Aim... Fire! After we shot all of the bombs, we used a measuring tape to determine how accurate our predictions were. We wrote down the actual distances and then compared them to the original guesses. Who was the closest? How much more/less did you guess? If you have to guess again, what would you say? Did the bombs all go the same distance? Why do you think that is? Do you think you can make the bombs land in the dump truck? Where ...

For those of you who have been following us the past few weeks, you know that we have been highly focused on the theme of BUGS for quite some time and more specifically on caterpillars and butterflies for the last couple of weeks. Here is an update. Our live caterpillars from Insect Lore: (I don't have a photo from this exact observation from yesterday. "Crabby" has now made it to the top of the container as well.) The caterpillars we have been growing are coming along quite nicely: Our creative meals and snacks have sparked the children's interest in coming up with other ways in which we could eat "caterpillars" and "butterflies". More on this topic will come in a later post! The children have been creating lots of caterpillars and butterflies through out art area, and this morning one of the little guys even found a way to make a butterfly with our Magnatiles: We will be continuing with this theme until we have exhausted interest, and right now, ...

There are a lot of great things you can do with shaving cream. We often play with shaving cream after doing a project with food coloring or Kool-aid that stains your fingers. The shaving cream is wonderful at helping to remove the colored stains. Sometimes we make shaving cream sculptures, where we just spray the table with shaving cream and then we play and "just see what happens." Sometimes we use the shaving cream as a great sensory writing area to practice our lines, dots, and squiggles! For some of the older children, we practice writing our letters in the cream. I have fun little sayings for writing each letter. In these photos, we are practing the letters S and M. For the letter S, as we write, we say- "squiggle, wiggle, wiggle-- sssssssssssssssss" and for the letter M we say "Up, over the mountain and down, Up, over the mountain and down---mmmmmmmmmmm." Sometimes when we are finished making sculptures and finished practing our writing, we add some...

All of the children here, even the wee-little ones are super intrigued by the computer. We have laptops that travel throughout the house, and they all like to push the buttons and watch the screen. What exactly do we use the laptops for while children are here? Well, a number of things. I do my paperwork on a laptop, update the blog, etc. The children use the internet (supervised and guided) to find out information on a wide array of topics and to play some educational games. We also use the laptop to view our slideshows created with photos taken by both the staff and children. BUT... by far the most popular use of my laptop is the paint program!!!! I have an HP Touch Smart, the screen swivels so that you can cover up the keyboard, and there is a stylus attached. We have a wide variety of children's art work and writing practice via Ms. Amy's computer. Enjoy a sampling of our computer paint ;).