Outdoor Hour Challenge #32: Pine Trees

 

A NOTE:  I HAVE BEEN COMPLETELY SIDETRACKED AND DID NOT POST THIS ON TIME.  WE ACTUALLY DID THIS STUDY IN OCTOBER.

We did not do any nature studies during our week off...well, nothing official.  My kids and I both seem to take notice of the world around us more so now that we are doing the Outdoor Hour Challenges.  We delight in the simple butterfly flitting across our yard, the pretty vine growing up a tree trunk, etc.  But now our little vacay is over and we are back to official studies!

This week we focused on pine trees.  Ya'll know how I love to tell a story, and I definitely have one for this week's challenge. LOL  I had to take the kids down the street to our county's recycling center to actually find a pine tree.  This is sad, because we once had two glorious, tall, majestic pines in our own front yard!  We lost them both to hurricanes.  And when we went on a hunt in the neighborhood for a pine to study, I realized we were the only house that even ever had pines at all!  I was like a woman possessed every time we drove anywhere, looking for an elusive pine lol.  Luckily when we took some cardboard to recycle we found ourselves some pines (some that we could actually get to and observe...there were some on private property or dense areas we just couldn't access.)  So on our nature study day I drove the kids down to the recycle center and let them study away.  They picked pine cones and needles, rubbed bark and generally had a good time.  We got a few looks from other folks dropping off their recycling when we were in the car doing sketches, but they were friendly. :)

We divided up the sketching assignments, with ds2 drawing a pinecone and the tree and ds3 drawing the needles.  Ds4 did his own version of a tree.