Outdoor Hour Challenge #32

We did manage to take a walk yesterday and we talked about the pines in our neighborhood. I hope to get over to campus later on this week to take pictures and study pine trees for our tree book. We talked about the pine tree we saw and pointed it's central stem, whorls and the leader. Princess go a real kick out of pointing out the leaders! We did find one tree with a split in the trunk and now it had three central stems. We talked about how this tree had been damaged at one point and that's why it looked that way. What a great teaching opportunity! Thanks Barb for giving us the pages in the Handbook of Nature to prepare or I never would have known how to answer her question about that tree! I forgot my camera on our walk, so we had to go back to get the picture of this tree, a Virginia Pine.

We took samples of the needles and a pine cone from this tree. Once we got home, we cut the needles and examined them. We also took apart our pine cone. All the seeds were gone, but we could see the pockets where they went. Here are our nature journal entries.