Outdoor Hour Challenge Week 5

It's been a while since we completed an outdoor hour challenge, but we haven't given up! We've had a month or so off homeschooling because of various travel commitments. However, I'm hoping it won't be too difficult to get back on track.

The children and I enjoyed a lovely nature study morning in our local park last Friday. We've been having wonderful weather for the last couple of weeks - around 20 degrees C and it's amazing to be out and about in just a t-shirt in mid-November. However, the trees are losing their leaves fast because winter is supposed to be on its way soon, so I thought this might be our last chance to collect any autumn leaves for craft purposes.

First stop was to check out Sophie and Charis's trees, and they'd both lost all their leaves:

Sophie's Ash tree

Charis's Hawthorn tree

We haven't started started our list of trees in our nature journal yet, but the first entries to go in will be Ash, Hawthorn, Sycamore, Lime, Crab Apple, Willow and Oak, since those are the trees we come across most often in the park. The kids had a lot of fun, and I'm so glad that they seem to be enjoying our nature study walks more than when we first started, although it's not every day they get to jump in huge piles of crunchy leaves! We picked up several leaves that we thought still looked pretty, although many were already dry and brittle. Sophie and Charis also had great fun collecting sticks and spotting a jay and a squirrel in the trees.

Back at home we tried to iron our leaves between sheets of wax paper and stick them on the windows. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but it came out pretty well I think (the large red one is actually from our neighbours grape vine, which we spotted on the ground when we came back home):

Autumn leaves

We also used some of the leaves we'd collected to make greetings cards by covering them on the front of the card with clear laminate.

Sophie, who's a budding artist, has been voluntarily drawing lots of trees in her pictures recently. I don't know if it's got anything to do with our nature focus! She's getting pretty good at seeing how the branches come off the trunk. I asked her today if she'd like to draw one of the apple trees in our garden so that we could put the picture in our nature diary, which she did. As you can see, it's still hanging on to a few of its leaves:

Apple tree in our garden by Sophie aged 5