Outdoor Hour Challenge Week 4

    Since Autumn has just begun I decided to choose 'Trees' as our focus area. I'm looking forward to watching the leaves turn colour and making collages of sycamore leaves with the girls. There are so many different trees in our local park, and I'd love to be able to identify them better.
   I forgot this week to get the girls to stop and be quiet and tell me what they could hear, see and feel. Sophie reminded me when we got back home - it seems she really enjoys that part of the nature walk.
    Once we got to the park I asked the girls to choose a tree each that interested them. From their chosen tree we looked for leaves on the ground that had fallen nearby, any seeds or berries, and we also did a bark rubbing, as well as jotting down in a notebook any other interesting features.

Sophie's Tree

  
  
    Sophie chose this tree. Its leaves had barely turned at all so we couldn't find any on the ground. We noticed they were growing in groups of five. We thought at first it didn't have any seeds or berries but then we noticed a few long seeds and were able to take some for our nature journal. The bark was fairly smooth and almost orange in colour, with little bits of green moss growing on it. Later on when I looked it up in our tree book I decided it must have been some kind of ash tree, although I'm not sure exactly which type - possibly a Narrow-leaved Ash, although the leaves didn't look that narrow.

Charis's Tree

    Charis chose this tree. The bark was quite rough and there was more moss growing on this trunk. The leaves on this tree had nearly all turned brown and fallen off. There were red berries on the ground that belonged to this tree too. We decided it was probably a Common Hawthorn tree. (By the way, the leaves in the photo are from another type of young tree that was growing right next to the Hawthorn).
   We enjoyed the rest of our nature walk. We found lots of acorns, pine needles, pine cones, conkers and various leaves. Sophie noticed some white 'stuff' on the pine trees, and we discovered it was sticky sap. We scraped some onto our fingers and smelt it. The girls also pointed out mushrooms and clovers and a little squirrel, which got chased up a tree by the stray dog that followed up all the way around the lake.

Playing Pooh Sticks

We stopped to play Pooh sticks on the little bridge, but the water was flowing quite fast from all the rain we've had recently. We didn't see any dead animals this week, although the girls felt very sorry for the stray dog, who was very thin and eagerly gobbled up all the crackers that we threw at it. We talked about how stray dogs and cats have to find their own food from amongst the rubbish or from people's scraps. Unfortunately there are a lot of stray dogs in this part of the world and there's nothing we can do to help.

When we got home I updated our family nature journal, writing up our findings, pasting in the bark rubbings and sealing in the leaves, seeds and berries with clear, sticky film. The girls weren't that interested in helping me. Perhaps they're still too young - neither of them can read yet. I did read the entries to them later and asked them to help me remember what we saw, but I think I just have to model nature journalling to them for now. When they're older I'd love to try doing some sketches together, but Charis and Nathaniel have very short attention spans when we're out and about!