Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

Do you use chalk? Do you ever end up with iddy biddy chalk stubs? What do you do with them? I found this great idea from The Chocolate Muffin Tree   and   The Imagination Tree where you can crush them to make paint, but we decided that rather than making paint, we would just SPLAT our stubs all over the wet sidewalk! The technique is quite simple. Wait for the rain to stop OR go out in the rain... Plop a chalk stub down and hit it with a hammer.... and SPLAT! Lovely bursts of color! An opportunity to use real tools. If/when the sidewalk starts to dry up, make sure you have a water bottle available for spraying!  Spraying, pounding, drawing.... great fun with chalk! And, when you get tired of chalk, attempt to recreate the plunger print pumpkin patch.....   that the rain washed away!  Have fun pounding the pavement  sidewalk! (For more photos of our explorations, don't forget to stop by our Facebook page !) This p...

With the new standards for cribs in childcare coming into effect in a few months, there are a lot of cribs out there that will no longer be used as cribs. We don't use cribs in our home, but a friend of mine had four that she was getting rid of. It seriously ERKS me to think of all of those cribs in a landfill.  After all.... they have some perfectly good parts that can be put to use! Before we could get to work making our upcycled creations, we had to take apart the cribs.  I was really excited to see that some of the cribs had plexi-glass ends. I have oodles of uses for plexiglass! The children spent hours working with real tools - screwdrivers to be exact, taking apart the cribs! The children managed to successfully take apart two of the cribs. Their concentration was amazing, and their excitement when the screws were removed and the pieces came apart was priceless! I have been collecting upcycled ideas for cribs for quite some time, and now that I'...