Outdoor Hour #31 - Focus on Trees

We are starting a Tree Focus with our Outdoor Hour Challenges. We have such a variety of trees in our neighborhood we should be able to find a few a lot of new trees to identify and look at. We have become acquainted with a number of our neighborhood trees the last few months and it is nice to hear the kids get excited when they see those same types of trees other places. When they actually remember the names it always brings a smile to my face.

But before leaving on our walk Sophie had to stop and play with her snap dragons. She has wanted some for a long time. We finally went to the nursery last week and she picked out a pot of them for her own. She is taking good care of them and they are flowering nicely.

The neighbors tree caught our eye first. It is a ginkgo tree and at the moment it has all sort of balls all over it.
The ground is also covered with squished ones and they don't smell particularly good so we moved along.

We of course had to look at the flowers. These ones were very soft so we had to also touch them. Look Henry found a snail.
He wanted to take it home but I told him he had to put it back. He wasn't happy about that.

This tree has some nuts on it.I don't know what kind of tree it is but it is fun to see so many different types of things on the trees today.

Here the boys are examining some pine cones on a pine tree.
Sophie knew the name of this tree. She told me it was a yucca tree. I had to look it up to make sure she was right. And sure enough she was correct. Someone else must have told her the name. It wasn't me.

This is one of the biggest and oldest trees in our neighborhood. The sidewalk is made to go around this live oak. Sophie picked up a number of accorns that are scattered about under it.

We made it home and the kids added a few more acorns and pine cones to our jar of treasures.


Sophie decided to draw a picture of one of the many fan palms we have around our block.

It was another pleasant trip around the block. Even after traveling along this same street at least 2 or 3 times a week we are still able to see new things each time.