Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

With the extreme weather this week, we have not been able to spend time outside. (When I say extreme, I mean that the windchill has been so cold that the local public schools have closed). With the extra indoor time, our easels have been busier than normal! Today, one of the "paintbrushes" of choice was a hand drill.  The set up for this is quite simple, instead of using a drill bit-- screw a paintbrush into the drill, set out for exploration and... sit back and watch! It usually takes a bit of concentration and tinkering to figure out how to make the drill work. Sometimes the paint never makes it onto the paper as it is quite engaging to spin the brush in the paint. The drills are always available for us, and having them at the easel is a very different experience from painting with them on the table or floor. A different muscle set is required to hold the drill up to paint on the easel. I cannot remember for sure where I first saw this idea, but I'm pretty sure it was i...

If you have been following the blog for any period of time, you know that we like to give the children a wide range of process art experiences. We use a lot of different types of tools and give the children freedom to choose materials. This becomes a bit trickier when the children are younger. They are not always able to articulate exactly what they would like to use or what they need.  So, with infants and toddlers, I tend to offer a set of supplies for them to explore. The art station is always available to them to make other choices, but typically I have a few selections available to them on the table.  During this particular exploration- I gave them each a container of white tempera paint. (I always add a little bit of dish soap to my paint. I know it says that it is washable, but the soap helps it wash out even better!) The children are welcome to explore the materials in any matter they deem fit. I don't demonstrate, and I rarely create beside them...

Lately, there has been a lot of construction on our street.  It has provided for endless hours of entertainment and learning fun! We have been watching the trucks as they work, reading about them in books, and racing our toy trucks up and down ramps. We also decided it would be fun to run some of our cars and trucks though the paint and make tracks on paper! The children decided that they wanted to try green paint and yellow paper. So, I put out a large sheet of paper for each child and added some paint to a large plastic tote lid we had hanging around in the closet.  Driving the toy vehicles in the paint was nearly as much fun as it was to drive them on the paper!    The children were engaged in making prints with the vehicle tires for quite some time. Some of the children were so persistent, they even wore holes in the paper where they were driving back and forth! (Remember-when things like this happen- it is okay! Art with young children...

While I was going through old photos, I realized that there are oodles of activities that we have done that I thought I had blogged about and shared with you... that never made it past the photo shoot! There are literally not enough hours in a day! So, for those of you who have children enrolled- you'll realize that these photos are quite old - circa 2010. For those of you in cyberspace- I bet you would have never known if I didn't mention it! For those of you who follow the blog, you know that I am a huge fan of process based art. This activity is a little bit busy for indoor use- although the mess can easily be cleaned up if you are brave enough to try it. I gave the children a selection of paints. (The determined which colors). We used washable tempera paint this time with a little bit of dish soap added to ease in washing. The process is quite simple. 1: Dip the swatter in the paint, 2: Swat the paper 3: Repeat.  The children had the opportunity to u...

As I was going through photos today, I ran across a number of picture sets of things that I had intended to blog about a LONG time ago. When life gets crazy, the blog is typically the first thing to go.  Now that I am reorganizing and rethinking things, I thought I would pull a couple of those "someday" posts together for you. (For those of you who have children in care, you will notice that these photos are almost a year old- but that's okay) Last summer- we had a couple of great days of warm, summer rain. It wasn't raining really hard- gently, just slightly more than a sprinkle... So we decided that we would create some paintings and bring them outside in the rain.  In order to keep the paper from tearing- and for the process to work best, we opted to use pieces of freezer paper to paint on. We also used a combination of tempera and watercolor paints, being water soluble- the rain could have an impact on the painting.  We spent so...

   Those of you who have been following the blog for some time know that we tend to offer art activities  closer to the process end of the spectrum most of the time. (Sometimes we do craft.....) I saw a great activity on Pinterest where the art students drew with permanent markers and then used watercolor paints to color over the drawing - the process was fantastic- and the product looks AMAZING too! (Note- the pin I found was used with much older children and I did not wish to give as much direction,- but I liked the idea of mixing the two medias).  So, I set out some markers and freshly made homemade watercolors. (You can find the recipe for those in this post- we make ours with Kool-Aid so that they are vibrant and scented! AND YES- they do bubble like crazy when you make them. It is the reaction of the acids and bases you are mixing)     Like any of our projects- I staged the environment by providing specific materials for th...

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...

I saw this wonderful idea over at Learning For Life, where the children had the opportunity to roll paint on a table with rolling pins!  (She saw the idea over at Casa Maria's Creative Learning Zone , somehow I missed it there!) I thought... How cool is that! So, of course, we had to try it and adapt it for ourselves. We started with our squeeze bottles of paint on our plexi-glass plates. The children had fun squeezing the paint. Some of the children were squeezing blobs and lines, and some of the children were making creations: After they were satisfied with the paint on the table, they started rolling....  and rolling....  and rolling! Some of them rolled with rolling pins, some of them with paper towel tubes.. and some with both.  We rolled until we didn't want to roll anymore. Some of us made some prints....  Some of us even rolled our paint covered rolling pins on paper: And some of us just played with t...