Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

I've been using Tumblr to help me keep track of some of the great ideas I find online. You can check out my Tumblr page here: http://childcentralstation.tumblr.com/ I have one more big project to finish for my class, otherwise life is starting to slow down enough to blog again :). Here are a few photos of some of our recent art/craft endeavors..... Dane is super excited about being in the Wolf Pack for Cub Scouts. We decided to make a wolf t-shirt. I found a wolf pattern on one of the boy scout sites, enlarged it and made a plastic stencil. After I used silver paint with the stencil, Dane colored it in with fabric markers. Then we Tie Dyed the shirt with all kinds of great colors.... I finished it off with a second coat of sliver paint and Dane added another coat of fabric marker. We also put his name on the back: Wintery weather has started to arrive, and I needed to whip up a couple of new pairs of mittens! Dane's new coat is orange, gray, and black.... I've been itchin...

One of my favorite quotes (I use this along with my signature in email correspondence) comes from the Bee Movie: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Bee's wings are too short and their bodies are too round to make getting airborne very likely..... Bees, ofcourse, fly anyway, because... BEES DON'T CARE WHAT HUMANS THINK IS IMPOSSIBLE." ~ Bee Movie I'd like to consider myself a "bee" most of the time. Much of my continued inspiration for believing in impossible things comes from the children I work with. Young children view the world as limitless, anything is possible. As my blogger friend Scott recently posted, children don't make the assumptions that some of us grown ups do. They stretch and test the limits, their creativity and ingenuity is not confined by a set of rules "true or not." (Scott really has a great post about questioning your assumptions over at Brick by B...

Today, we decided to sew some "pumpkins." If you haven't already noticed, I'm a collector of "stuff." Things that other folks might throw out, I find a use for one way or another. One of the things I have been collecting for quite some time are embroidery hoops. We use the big ones when we make homemade paper. The little ones are put to use in a variety of different ways, today we used them to help us make "pumpkins." I found some remnant of a rubbery shelf liner that we used as our canvas. We put it into the hoops and cut off the excess. (This part was kind of tricky for most of our little friends. It required quite a bit of extra help. You could potentially do this part prior to working with the children.) The only reason we used shelf liner is because I saw some remnants sitting on a shelf in our craft closet. You could use different types of fabric or canvas. I do recommend using something with holes until your little ones have mastered t...