We love trees! We love nature! There is nothing better than the feeling of grass between our toes, isn’t there? Since April is such a wonderful month where Spring is in full swing, the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming and we celebrate Earth Day, we decided to do some fun hands-on activities, some multi-level lessons, read some awesome books and offer FREE printables…and all are pertaining to trees!

For the love of trees! Take a look!

Hands-on Tree Card Order & Sorting Activity

As a toddler AND a girl, Sister loves to sort, rearrange and carefully placing things on tables or mats. She is just like me! But it isn’t just a personality trait, it is actually something most toddlers this age like to do. Their fine motor skills are more refined and they make good use of those skills by practicing A LOT.

I gave Sister a beautiful repurposed silver jewelry box with tree cards (our free printable!) and let her explore. She had a long period of concentration and focus. She took the cards out and put them in order (some were upsidedown and others were backwards). She made sure they were all rightside up and facing up. Then she put them in a neat pile.

After that, she proceeded to neatly place the cards on the bamboo placemat and rearranged them in different ways. She tried leaving the box in the middle of the placemat and placing the cards around it and then decided to move the box to the side and rearranged the cards. Finally, she found a layout she loved. She took all the cards off and turned the placemat sideways. Perfect! It’s amazing how toddlers’ brains work! Love it!

Hands-on Tree Recognition & Matching Activity

Now that Sister found the perfect layout for the tree cards, we were then ready for our tree recognition and matching activity. We got a Toob set… an awesome set… a tree set! It comes with 10 trees to recognize, study and match up with the free printable cards. This mini tree replica set is truly amazing. Sister had fun picking one tree at a time and matching it to the right card.

Click on image to read details. To order, click here.

There are several clues on how to make sure the trees were matched up correctly.

• Visual clues: you can tell by color, shape, height, etc.
• The name of the tree is on the tree base
• The tree bases are a little different
• Tree trunks: some are thicker, shorter, lighter, etc.

Free Printable Cards

These 10 cards are part of the free printable that I made for you! They are used for sorting, recognition and matching. I made them with enough room on the side (above the tree names) for your child to stand the tree up. The trees included are: Petticoat Palm, Juniper, Monkey Puzzle Tree, Maple Tree (yellow and red), Aspen, Elm, Pine, Topiary and Sequoia. For more details, go HERE.

Awesome Books about Trees

The books we used for this lesson with Brother are:

• A Tree is Growing
• I Wonder Why… Trees Have Leaves
• I Wonder Why Pine Trees Have Needles
• A Field Guide to the Grand Canyon
• We Celebrate Arbor Day in Spring
• Trees (click on image below)
• World Book Encyclopedia

It was great learning about deciduous and evergreen trees, about leaves and needles, about single and compound leaves, about how leaves change colors and what tree bark, leaves, flowers, seeds and fruit look like.

Tree Notebook Pages

Brother used these Tree Notebook Pages by Harrington Harmonies to go to a higher level of study on trees. This set comes with 28 pages of common tree names plus 15 additional pages. We went through this amazingly beautiful Tree Notebook Pages printable and found the tree pages that match with our mini tree replicas. Awesome! Time to learn more about trees!

He drew the leaves, seeds and bark. He found out (using the books mentioned above) how some of these trees are used (he determined that the most important use for Pine is to make it a Christmas tree), which zone they grow in, what kinds of leaves they have and so many other things. He really enjoyed finding out that trees can be so different from each other!

Brother used to think that trees were just trees. These lessons and activities definitely opened up his eyes to just how amazing and special each individual tree is. He was impressed on how some can survive in the dessert while others thrive in icy and snowy places.

All in all, this was a very cool set of lessons and activities for Earth Day awareness and to remind ourselves of our responsibility to love our planet, but to also take good care of it.

Trees are so incredible and help keep our air clean. Next, we’ll plant some seeds and look into each of them planting a tree. Actually, I would love to make it a yearly tradition. If my two children plant one tree per year, in ten years, they would have added 20 trees to our planet. Imagine the effect two children’s act of love would do in 20, 50, 70 years! 😉

To print your FREE Tree Cards: Tree Toob Printable Cards

To get your Tree Notebook Pages, click on the image below.

____________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________

____________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________