Tuesday, October 21, 2008

maple trees

Okay... so we're jumping all around with the Handbook of Nature Study Blog's challenges! Today we started on challenge #34... Maple Trees.

After picking the Norway Maple in front of our house as the subject of our year long tree study, we have noticed different kinds of maples around our neighborhood. This helped us to decide to jump to this challenge next.

We had barely made it out our backdoor before the kids found this...

After consulting the guidebook, we determined that it was a Silver Maple leaf (from three yards over).

We found another maple tree on the corner...
Apparently my daughter is a tree-hugger and I honestly have no clue what Alex is doing.

(sidenote on Clara's hair.... she came upstairs this morning and asked if we had any classes today... I told her no and she said... good, then I don't need to comb my hair.. sigh)

We thought this tree...
... was smiling at us.

Clara was enjoying being outside and took off skipping...
This isn't from a maple tree...
... but we thought we would bring it home (along with a leaf from the tree) to identify.

When we got home the kids got out all of their leaves from our walk and their guidebooks. They worked on identifying them for quite a while and then did their entries in their journals (still need to photograph those).

Besides the benefits I've mentioned before... today I realized that another great benefit of these challenges is that we get outside. I know that sounds simple enough but today, after having a sick day yesterday and no classes to go to, we might have stayed in all day.

2 comments:

Barb said...

I love tree huggers. :)

Thanks for blogging about the side benefits of outdoor time...we sometimes all need a push to get out the door.

Thanks for the lovely entry,
Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Anonymous said...

Wonderful pictures! I think the little "cones" are from a poplar tree. We used to have one in our front yard. If you have one close by, it's fun because they make a ton of them and are close enough to mini pinecones for crafting or fairy houses.