September Nature Club: Trees

Over the summer I began thinking how fun it would be to be part of a nature club. I emailed the ladies in our homeschool group and was excited when five of them expressed an interest in starting one. My bloggy friends Melissa and Cindy inspired me with the idea of starting a group, so I asked them for tips on the kinds of things they do at their nature clubs, and they were so helpful. You can find a wealth of nature study information at both of their blogs and at their new company's site, NaturExplorers.

Since we just had our second meeting this week, I figured it was time to actually post pictures from the first one we had back in September. :)

Our focus was trees and leaves, but we also had lots of fun exploring a creek in the nature park where we met.

We started out by going on a nature walk and looking not only for leaves but anything we found interesting.

Then we had everyone find a leaf, making sure they knew which tree it came from. We paired everyone up with a partner, they swapped leaves, and then had to guess which tree their partner's leaf came from. The younger ones needed the adults to help them, but they seemed to enjoy it.

After getting their original leaves back from their partners, the kids made leaf rubbings, measured the circumference of their tree, and did rubbings of their trees' bark. I brought along several field guides that we used to identify our leaves.
We used this notebooking page to record all of the information.

I wasn't able to take many photos of our nature walk and tree activities because I was leading the meeting, but I did manage to snap a few of the kids exploring the creek.

My friend's daughter working on her notebooking page.


Can you see the round, green thing in Sweet Pea's hand? It's a black walnut she found on our nature walk, and she held onto it for nearly the rest of the day. I thought she was going to fall sleep with it that night. :)




After we finished up learning about trees, the kids must have played in the creek for over an hour. It really was the highlight of the day.


My friend Kim, who always seems to be able to find the coolest things in a creek, found this baby crawdad...


...and this little garter snake.

It was so much fun to explore God's creation with other families.
I look forward to telling you about our October meeting soon!