Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

 Sometimes, life just needs a little bit more color......  Especially in the spring, when most of the snow has melted, but the grass and flowers have not begun to bloom.  It is the perfect time of year for sidewalk paint!  Add a bit of color to some cornstarch. We used some of the stain from the markers that don't work , but you could use food coloring or even a bit of paint.  Add a lot of water, an voila! Sidewalk paint!  Today, we used paint brushes with our paint. In the past, we have used turkey basters or just thrown the paint all around.  We have also used this paint with a pendulum.  The paint becomes more opaque as it dries.  It is the perfect solution for that "early" spring grey, when you just need to add a little bit of color!

Welcome to this week's edition of What Would You Do With It? Wednesday. This week we are featuring coffee cans. I know I am dreadfully behind on my Wednesday list, so in an effort to try to catch up a little bit, this week's post is going to be on how to use both metal and plastic coffee cans! I've seen coffee can stilts in a million places, I'm not sure where I first learned about making them! These are quite basic and I was reminded of them by this post over at Martha Stewart.  Her tutorial uses smaller cans, we like the big ones with coffee cans instead, but the elephant feet are a nice touch! Every year we make a coffee can totem pole in our rock garden. Last year we made Halloween themed ones in addition to the "regular" spring one we put out every year. The original inspiration for these coffee can totem poles came from Family Fun magazine. If you are having trouble finding metal coffee cans you might want to try your local freecycle group....

Mary Jo Huff was one of the keynote speakers at the UPECC this past weekend in Escanaba.  If you are ever looking for a high-energy, inspiring, storytelling trainer to see..... Look for Mary Jo!   In due time, I will continue to add tidbits to this blog from some of the great conferences and trainings I have been attending. This short video clip above is from the Family Night Mary Jo offered at our conference. The clip below is from one of the workshop sessions. Mary Jo gave us a lot of great ideas for storytelling and using props that folks are going back and putting to use immediately! I know that we have been playing with some peepers that we purchased from Mary Jo at the conference.  The children are having a great time creating stories and acting them out with their new "peeper" friends! It sounds like we will be spending some time making accessories and developing our plays! Stay tuned!

    This post appeared exactly one year ago on the Child Central Station website and blog (before I moved the blog here...) Karen Nemeth has been a great contact and inspiration for me. As the president of the UPECC last year, I was in quite a predicament. Our keynote speaker called me to cancel days away from our annual conference. Fortunately, Karen was ready to jump in with both feet and take on the challenge of filling in.  Let me tell you, trying to work out the details and putting trust in someone so last minute was no easy task, but as they say... things happen for a reason!      Karen and I spent a couple of hours at the airport as we were waiting for her departing flight after the conference. I know I could have just dropped her off, but I didn't want her to have to wait in the airport for that long, so I stayed and we chatted up a storm. In addition to these wonderful caterpillars, Karen told me about Teach Preschool on Facebook....

This post has been transferred from our previous blog. It was originally posted in April of 2010. Children are fascinated by the chemical reaction between baking soda and vinegar. I know we buy both in bulk around here! We do a lot of fun color mixing activities, but this is by far the most requested! I hope you are enjoying my re-posts while I am at the UPECC :).  Everyone talks about the volcano experiments, using vinegar and baking soda.... but have you ever tried the same experiment to teach how to make the secondary colors???? This is one of my favorites, and the children's too: Prior to the children becoming involved fill children's test tubes with vinegar- add food coloring (I use the Wilton pastes as they are much more vibrant) to make red, yellow, and blue. Also, mix food coloring into the baking soda (in bowls) making red, yellow, and blue. You can have older children help with this part of the activity, but I've found that for younger children, it ...

We live in a really cool place! I have really enjoyed participating in the post card exchanges hosted by Teach Preschool this past year. It has really given us an opportunity to learn and celebrate the things that are wonderful about our community in addition to learn about and hear from other children all around the world! (I will have a new post coming sometime soon as we have been receiving another pile of great cards!)   In a couple of weeks we are going to participate in a really cool postcard exchange with other daycares, preschools, and homeschools from around the world. (We registered to participate through Teach Preschool on Facebook.) We need to send about 6 postcards a week to the other participating schools/daycares/homes where we can tell them a little bit about our state and our community. I know that I would be more than capable of completing the postcards, but what good would that be? This project is an opportunity for us to learn about other places in the worl...

This post was originally published in September. We had a great time with our cave. Some of my little ones have been building forts lately, and I have a feeling that we will be creating some more cave paintings in the near future! Dane made a decision that he wanted to learn more about Art and Art History this year. So this week, we started to learn about cave paintings. We read a couple of books from the library, and we looked at a lot of cave paintings online. One of the books we read a section of is: Cave Paintings to Picasso (The inside scoop on 50 Art Masterpieces) by Henry Sayre We found a large collection of cave paintings while researching the internet here: Wikipedia has a great collection of works of art here. It was interesting to see the different paintings from different places around the world. After looking at so many great works of art, it was time to create our own. Dane thought it would be fun to do as a group project, so that is what we did. First, before...