After School: Plants

For my after school program this week we took a good look at the plants around us. One of my girls taught us all she knows about ferns (she is very astute!) We looked at the repeating patterns in the fronds, how each segment looks like a miniature of the whole fern itself. And we saw the curled fiddleheads of some young ferns, but none were the right type to eat (you don't want to eat the fuzzy ones!)

(Not one of my personal photos, I got excited talking with the girls 

and forgot to take out my camera...)

Then we moved up to the trees. I made up a simplified dichotomous key to try out and the girls seemed to really enjoy using it. I explained to them that it's like a "Choose your own adventure" book. If you see a certain characteristic on a tree, you move to a certain question which eventually leads you to the name of the tree you're most likely looking at (the ending of the adventure you chose!)

A fun dichotomous key!

This is a great activity for the 8-9 year olds I'm working with in this group. As for the actual key itself that I made, I'm planning on making some edits to it before I use it again. I realize it'd be easier for children if there are more action verbs at the beginning of each choice:

• LOOK at the branch, is it...
• SCRATCH and SNIFF the twig, does it smell like wintergreen? (Then it is black or yellow birch! I'd have to have it lead to a question about the color of the bark.)

The hour went by really quickly, I could talk trees all day! The girls particularly liked learning about the black birch and cherry trees because of their distinctive smells (a cherry twig will smell a bit almondy and I think it smells yucky). We even peeled back the bark and tasted the birch, it was delicious! Coming out of the woods each girl told me her favorite tree. One said moose maple, the second birch, and the third beech. I guess the trees we saw made quite an impression!

Next Monday we're going to talk about the animals we can find in the woods at our school.