Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

 Earlier this week, you were introduced to our Foamy Bubbles Water Table.   This table is great for your infants and toddlers, but it also tends to be a great place for exploration for older children as well. While pushing down on the foam to make bubbles,  it was discovered that the wet sponge/foam preserves your hand print! This lead to an intensive investigation-  If pushing your hand down in the foam leaves a print.... I wonder what else you could press down in the foam to make prints with? The children tried a multitude of toys, blocks, etc.  Each and every item left a mark or print in the foam! The favorite item found that kept  the children investigating for hours were.....   plastic cookie cutters! As you can see from the photos, the cutters left a dark imprint in the foam.  It "magically" disappears when you rub across it. Our foam is not a special kind, just plain old ordinary craft sp...

Painting seed pods to hang as ornaments on the Christmas tree- Craft. Anytime you have a preconceived idea of what you are making, it is no longer truly about the process.  Regardless of how "open ended" you think you are making the craft, if it has a purpose or an expected end product, in my mind... it is no longer child-centered art. One way or another because you have given it a name or a specific outcome you drive the product. I don't think that you can always separate art from craft or craft from art, because the two are so delicately intertwined. I think that rather than a definitive black and white separation, we are dealing with various shades of gray. I am by no means saying that craft has no merit, as you will soon read, sometimes... we craft, but most of the time, we strive for process art. Rolling paint on plexi-glass - art There are a lot of things I see other educators doing with children, that simply do not fit with my philosophy. For example, I don...

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...

A couple of weekends ago, we went to the corn maze with the Boy Scouts and I picked up a half a dozen ears of Indian Corn. The children had fun investigating the corn in our sensory bin. They spent some time husking it and looking at the various parts under the magnifying glasses.  Then, I set up a station for them to paint and/or print with the corn.  I decided to put a plexi-glass plate right over the sensory bin. ( If you remember the cribs we dismantled, I saved the plexi-glass ends!  The plexi-glass makes a great transparent tabletop... and is a wonderful surface to paint on!) I wanted to make sure that the children had ample choice in paint color, and that it was a self-service station. The squeeze bottles of tempera work great for this, and all of that squeezing is great for their fine motor skill development!  Two children worked at the station at a time. They chose which paints that they wanted to squeeze out onto the surface, and then they st...