Deciduous Trees {Nature Study}

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

One day my youngest child began asking a lot of questions about the trees in our yard.

What kind of tree is that?
Why does the trunk look like that?
Why does that tree have helicopters and the other one doesn’t?

So…I looked to my friends over at Shining Dawn Books and purchased the nature study called Delightful Deciduous Trees!! I love their nature studies, they are really full-blown unit studies centered around one topic in nature.

This was so simple to implement, we just read a book or two each day that we learned about trees. We spent a few minutes outside with our nature journals from time to time, we picked trees to observe and draw, we taped leaves in our journals, colored bark, read poetry about trees and memorized a poem about trees as well. We spent a few weeks – with just a little bit of time every other day – learning about trees.  Nothing hard about it.

I took the unit study from Shining Dawn, printed it and actually read parts of it aloud to my kids when we were learning about specific parts of the tree or if they had a question that was answered there. I also love the printable notebooking or journaling pages provided with the nature study.

We were able to learn a little bit more about 2 specific kinds of trees in our yard: black oak and white maple.

Tell Me, Tree: All About Trees for Kids
A Tree Is Nice
Tree For All Seasons
Sky Tree: Seeing Science Through Art

Now, I could have spent a lot longer with trees, but now my kids are obsessed with ROCKS. We have quite the rock collection going on in our home. So…I’m going to follow their lead and look at this unit from homeschool share and possibly another nature study from Shining Dawn…called Hard as a Rock.