Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

We have been busy with all kinds of collaborative efforts lately, You can still hop on over to PreKandK Sharing to link up your favorite painting activities/recipes,  and the Heart Project Fundraiser for the American Heart Association  is still going on for the entire month of February! Today, we are participating in the Paper Bag Challenge hosted by Tinkerlab . (If you remember, we've done this before with magazines and cardboard boxes .) Keeping with our child-centered philosophy, I plopped a giant pile of paper bags down in the middle of the floor and asked the children if they wanted to create and if so, what other materials did they need. None of the three children who worked on this project opted to create together or make the same thing :). YEAH for creativity and giving the children an opportunity to venture off on their own, to enjoy the process and control their own products!  (By the way, there has been an interesting series of posts o...

Earlier this summer, I managed to score a big lot of flannel board characters and stories for a couple of bucks at a yardsale. We have been playing with them on the floor and with a very small lap sized flannel board. I have had visions of a larger flannel board for quite some time, and thought that if I bought the pieces, I would make it a bigger priority to make one! Well, having the pieces really didn't help to change my priority of things to do list, that is, until this week! I had a scrap piece of hardboard and cut it to fit the bottom three shelves of one of our tall book shelves. (The dimensions are 28" x 43"). I gave it a quick coat of primer, and then covered one side with white felt. Then I hinged it to the book shelf! "Ta, Da!" A giant flannel board! The great thing about it is, the other side has a little overlap from the felt, but is basically a blank slate. It will make a great chalkboard if I ever remember to pick up that chalkboard...

I'm a big fan of open-ended, child-driven projects. Today, the children decided to use colored paper, scissors, shape punches and glue to make their own creations. We don't have a lot of glue that isn't colored here. When I first opened my daycare (5 years ago this week!) I purchased a large quantity of small glue bottles. I labelled them with various colors and added a little bit of liquid tempera paint to the glue. (I recently learned that you can use the markers that don't work to color glue too!) I'm not a fan of giving children glue in a container and using a qtip or other utensil to use the glue. I like to give them the experience of having to squeeze the glue out of the bottle. It is great for their fine motor skills. We use a lot of glue here. I know that children will need to use glue to stick things together when they get older, and that they will probably hear things like "a little dab will do you!" Later, not here, and not from me. Glue is inex...

It may look like wallpaper.... but it's not! This collage project gone crazy is finally done! We finished the last wall today! The food photos were collected from old magazines, and many of the children and staff have helped us to find them, cut them and collage them onto our kitchen walls! It has been a very lengthly project, but well worth it. We definitely have a one of a kind kitchen: The photos don't capture it exactly, it is much more vibrant in person. (More kitchen updates to come soon!)

One of my favorite activities to do in the warmer months is recycling paper. We save all of the unclaimed art and scraps of paper from other projects in a big tote. When we have a large amount, we fill the sensory table with scraps of paper and scissors. This first stage of the process often takes a day or so. The children are given the opportunity to come and go, cutting and ripping whenever they choose. (Some people use a paper shredder if their goal is make homemade paper. We try to do our without the aid of electrical tools.) In order to make great paper, it is necessary to cut the paper into tiny pieces. The smaller the better. This give the children ample opportunity to work with scissors and to tear paper which is very important to building their fine motor skills. We cut and we tore, and we cut and we tore... (You will notice that the majority of the paper is white. We usually reuse our colored scraps for other projects adding only a small amount into our recyclin...