Ms. Amy's Blog @Child Central Station

In Michigan, it is the time of year for caterpillars and butterflies again! My children absolutely love observing and documenting the butterfly life cycle. This little guy  is just a couple of days old and is "munching and crunching" away. (The photo was taken with our Zoomy handheld digital microscope. He is quite tiny, but with the aid of the microscope, we are able to watch him munch and crunch!) As those of you who know me know, I am not a fan of butterfly kits. If it is your only option, then they are better than nothing, but teaching children about butterflies native to your area and finding eggs is far more educational and memorable for the children. We make our own butterfly life cycle observation stations, and I thought I would share a few tips with you. First you will need: A plastic tote or other suitable container. (I like to use the 12 qt containers because they are big enough, but also very lightweight and easy to transport. They are also called sweater bo...

I'm back! We had a fantastic vacation, too hard to pick any "favorites" but here are a few highlights of the past two weeks: We visited Marine Land in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada. It was fantastic! We had the opportunity to feed and touch beluga whales!!!! Niagara Falls was unbelievable ;). We loved the Maid of the Mist boat ride (among other things....) All and all, we traveled just short of 2100 miles. It was great! I'm sure I'll be sharing more of our adventures in the days to come. Just before we left on vacation, our new globe arrived. We have a lot of maps, atlases, and puzzles of maps, inflatable globes, but we didn't have a "real" globe to explore. I decided to buy this one because Dane (and some of the other children) are wild about animals!  Is this globe cool or what? There are animals on it all over the place! When you plug it in, it illuminates even more critters that you cannot see when the light is off in the oceans. The childr...

Did you know that it is International Mud Day? I hope you are out playing in the mud!!!! We are on vacation. So, I have scheduled this post for you. As far as I am concerned, MUD DAY needs to be every day! Here are a few of our previous posts that have to do with mud: Our Mud Pie Kitchen (Most Recent Post with Renovation) Here is our "Clean Mud" (not really the kind of mud, MUD DAY is all about but still fun!) Marvelous Spring Mud! (With a bit of ice and snow...) Worms in the Mud Cave Painting (Paint made with mud/dirt) Indoor Colored MUD! We play in the mud pretty much any chance we get! How are you celebrating today? Being that our childcare is closed and we are on vacation, I am hoping to celebrate MUD DAY either on the shore of Lake Ontario or Lake Erie (depending on where we are on our road trip!). Thank you to Jaime over at Hands On As We Grow for setting up this wonderful blog hop!  If you have been playing in the mud, join in:

We are on vacation! I have scheduled a couple of posts, but don't plan on seeing much from us until we are back to work on July 11th :).

Last week, I gave you a sneak peek into the ins and outs of making your own light table .  (Well, at least our versions of them!)  There are oodles of different things you can do with a light table, but one of our favorites is to draw on it!  Sometimes we use sand and sometimes we use salt. Today, we covered our table with a layer of salt and then added a package of dry Kool-Aid to give the salt a slight tint and a wonderful smell! The children spent quite a bit of time throughout the day, drawing and writing.  Sometimes they would use their fingers or hands, and sometimes they used other tools like plastic butter knives or wooden dowels. I love how the light adds optical aesthetics to this tactile activity.  Even some of our younger friends found this activity to be intriguing.  Have you tried sand or salt on your light table? 

We have frogs! Our froglets have absorbed their tales! (We only have one that is still aquatic!) So, we invested in some moss..... And the tank is now more "land" based. We also started feeding our little froggies crickets today. It sure if fun to watch them hunt! We've been getting quite a bit of rain - so we have been spending a lot of time building forts.  I have a couple of posts scheduled and ready, but we are going on vacation in a few days an I won't be back to work until July 11th.  If all goes well with scheduled posts, you will still have a bit to read while we are on the road. Just know that I won't be responding to comments or doing much reading for awhile :).

I first learned of this nifty color separating trick over at Steve Spangler Science . The scientific name for this color separating is chromatography, and can easily be performed.  First, on an absorbent material (coffee filter, paper towel, etc...) draw a line or a dot with a water soluble black marker. We used coffee filters. They are absorbent and they fit perfectly into our art spinner! Then with a pipette or medicine dropper, add a few drops of water to the center of your dots or along your lines. Turn the spinner on and wait...... Can you see how the water pulled the colors out of the black pigment? Different types of markers made different color patterns. My little investigative art scientists wanted to know....... What happens if you use other colors? And off they went to investigate: Our other colors ran or bled, but they did not produce a rainbow of colors like the black did. While the children used the spinner, we tried another chromatography experiment. We drew ...