October’s Creation Club – Trees

Posted by Cindy on October 22, 2008

Our Creation Club met for the last time until spring. (Boo Hoo) This month’s focus was on trees and we were as busy as beavers!

As a warm-up activity, each child was asked to find a leaf from any tree in the area. They had to remember which tree it came from! Then, they exchanged leaves with someone and had to located the tree their new leaf came from. The partners worked together to give hints to each other if needed.

I gave a simple explanation of why leaves change colors in the fall while the kids took notes on a notebooking page.

Then, we played a game to warm up their detail finding skills. Everyone teamed up in partners again. The first partner had to close their eyes, while the second partner led them to a tree. With eyes still closed, the first partner had to touch the tree remembering as much detail as possible. The first partner then led them back to the starting point with eyes still closed. The first partner then had to try to locate the tree with eyes open. Fun!

Now the kids were ready to “adopt” a tree. Using a notebooking page from Considering God’s Creation, they had to notice all sorts of things about their tree such as bark style, tree shape, leaf type, leaf shape and more. On the back of this page, I added a few more things for them to do like measuring the circumference of the trunk, tracing a leaf and coloring in detail, sketching something they found using a magnifying glass and such. You can see this simple page here if you like.

Using watercolors, they had to paint a picture of their tree. We used our imaginations a bit since the drought has really caused all of our trees to lose their brilliant colors already.

Then, they were asked to take a few quiet minutes to write a poem about their tree or a prayer to God in thanksgiving of trees.

Finally, we took a short walk to some tree stumps to see if we could figure out the age of any of the trees that were once there by counting the rings.