Our Square in the Woods: The Tree (Fall Tree Study)

Our square in the woods hasn't changed much since last month. We did find some green acorns on the ground and there were quite a few more crunchy leaves on the ground. This trip we focused on trying to find some insects on our tree but we couldn't find any at all. We did enjoy the variety of moss and lichen on the tree trunk. Do you see the different kinds of lichen in the photo? Do you see the spider web? We also enjoyed drawing the tree on our notebook sheet that will include drawings of the tree in all four seasons. Free nature notebook pages that we used: Year-Long Tree Journal This system seems to work for us. We attach an empty ziploc bag to our clipboard and then use it to hold our little "treasures" that we find along the way. Until we devised this system, I always had my pockets filled with items the boys wanted to bring home. Now they can easily slip them into the baggie and hold it themselves. We used our books to identify the tree as an interior live oak. We collected some leaves and acorns and then took a walk down the hill to see what we could find. As we walked, we heard some sort of hawk above us screeching loudly. I could tell he was circling around us by the way the sound was carrying over the hill. Here are a few things we saw as we hiked back down the hill to the car. Some sort of fungus. Leaves from a California Buckeye tree A beautiful sappy pine cone. We had a great morning in the woods and will look forward to checking our square again next month. That afternoon we ended our day with a bike ride with a friend on a local bike trail. The skies were grey but the boys had enjoyed their day outside.