Cycles - Meet a Tree

Focus: A tree is the sum of many parts, each designed to perform a necessary function within the tree's life and within its seasonal cycle.

Puppets (Fir Tree, Maple Tree, Thunderhead, Sun, Wind, Tiny Fir Tree, cookie sheet for thunder sound, spray bottle for rain)

Materials Checklist
Puppet Show (puppets, script, cookie sheet for thunder, spray bottle for rain)
Sum of Many Parts (sapling tree, cardboard box, slide show, projector, screen, or magazine pictures of tree parts)
A Tree Are We (slips of paper, each noting a different tree part, one for each child)
A Look Inside (Parts of a Tree anatomy diagram, hand lenses, tree slices, optional bark samples, root samples, twigs, and leaves)
Reach Out and Touch (blindfolds (optional), one per pair)
Look and Find (Look and Find cards, clipboards, pencils)
Meet a Tree Questionnaire (Meet a Tree questionnaires, clipboards, pencils)
Tree Poem (clipboards, pencils, paper)
Tree-Mendous Trees (5/6 ELF) (Meet a Tree Questionnaires, cloth tape measures, yardsticks, pencils, clipboards, calculators, Estimating Tree Size and Age sheets)

Supplementary Reference Materials (Slide show scripts, Grades K-2, Grades 3-6; Tree Poem; Why Does Sap Run?; Kid Bits; What You Might See in a Tree Slice; Other Features of Wood; Look and Find Cards; Meet a Tree Questionnaire; Tree Drawing; Parts of a Tree; 5/6 ELF Activity: Tree-mendous Trees; Estimating Tree Size and Age; 5/6 ELF Questionnaire)

Additional Reading/Resources
National Audubon Society First Field Guide: Trees, by Brian Cassie, Chanticleer Press, Inc., New York, 1999.
Tree Finder, by May Theilgaard Watts, Nature Study Guild, Rochester, NY, 1991.
A Natural History of Trees, by Donald Peattie, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1991.
Reading the Forested Landscape, by Tom Wessels, Countryman Press, Woodstock, VT, 1997.
ELF Corner: Maple Sugaring (pdf file)

For Younger Children
Many of the activities in VINS's new Small Wonders book can be used in ELF, too. To find appropriate activities for children aged 3-6, click here.

Teaching suggestions
Take a good survey of the different kinds of trees at the school so you can plan ahead for the Winter Twigs workshop.

Puppet Show
This activity can be used as an introduction to this unit in place of the Sum of Many Parts.

A Tree Are We
Provide props (bark, leaves, nuts, seeds, twigs) for kids to use.

This unit contains lots of vocabulary – you may want to introduce terms xylem and phloem to older students only.

After the class has formed a tree, have the wind start to blow and the leaves and flowers fall off, then the wind gets stronger and twigs and branches fall off, it gets uprooted and the roots come out of the ground, then the tree dies and the bark, sapwood, heartwood decay. As each child leaves the tree, have them give their cards to the leader (a fun addition and gives a way to collect the cards and dismantle the tree. For ending, have a seed sprout.

Some schools liked Joseph Cornell's version better – a guided imagery with roles for each tree part.

Have every child create a tree using paper towel tube and paper plate for the base. Then use construction paper and yarn to make a tree with all the parts. This activity could be done as a closure, so everyone can bring a tree home.

One 1st grade class used tin cans covered with brown paper for base, stuffed stockings for roots, kids wrapped dark and light twine around cans (heartwood) to represent the annual rings, and students dressed the tree with branches and bark from a dead birch tree. Each child then wrote his/her name on a woodcut apple and these were hung from the tree.

This activity can be divided into two parts. In the first part, dress up a volunteer as a tree to review the puppet show and just focus on the outer, visible parts of tree — discussing the purpose of the trunk and wood inside, branches, crown of leaves, roots. Then, after looking at tree cookies and noticing tree rings, you can focus on the inner workings of the bark/phloem and heartwood/sapwood/xylem through a shorter version of “A Tree are We.”

Tree Cookies
Compare a slice from a large tree or cut stump with the tree cookies from branches.

One volunteer marked off the circumference of a giant sequoia in chalk on the blacktop playground.

Guessing Box – one volunteer selected 12 different tree parts and placed them one at a time in a box with a hole at the top. The box got passed around the first few students described what they were touching so the other students could guess what was inside.

Tree Poem
Keep the poems in a folder so you can bring them out again for the Winter Twigs unit. Maybe do a winter poem of the same tree!

If groups are stuck trying to write a poem, suggest that poems could have titles, questions and answers, rhymes or not, rhythmic beat (rap), and so on.

Extensions
-One volunteer looked up the “Largest Tree in the World” on the Internet – by volume it's the General Sherman Tree in California with a 36.5' diameter at the base. They drew a circle this size in chalk on the parking lot so the kids could see it, stand around it!
-Read aloud The Great Kapok Tree.
-Read Robert Frost's Good Bye and Keep Cold to older children.
Resources: Kindersley's Eyewitness Tree and Plant books;
Look What I did with a Leaf by Morteza Sohi; When Autumn Comes by Robert Maass.

Learning Goals

Concepts/Ideas:

• Different parts of a tree perform particular functions.
• Trees change with the seasons, growing rapidly in the spring and summer and slowing growth or shutting down in winter.
• Trees change throughout their lives – growing, adding bark, losing branches, etc.
• A cross-section of a tree trunk is a record of the life of a tree.

Vocabulary: Tree, Heartwood, Sapwood, Xylem, Phloem, Cambium, Bark, Branch, Twig, Leaf, Needle, Flower, Root, Photosynthesis, Cell, Evergreen, Deciduous

Skills:

• Role-playing to learn the different parts of a tree and their functions.
• Observing the parts of a tree trunk cross-section to understand how variation in the wood is a record of the life of the tree.
• Using senses other than sight to make observations about trees.
• Examining the characteristics of a tree from a variety of perspectives.
• Recording observations about a particular tree.

Grade Expectations:
Grades PK-K (S30, S38) Trees are living plants. They require sunlight, water, air, and nutrients to survive.

Grades 1-2 (S30, S31) Trees are a group of plants that all have a similar structure. Trees' unique structures make it possible for them to survive in a wide range of habitats. Trees grow and change with seasonal change.

Grades 3-4 (S30, S38) Trees have physical characteristics that make it possible for them to acquire what they need to survive in their environment.

Grades 5-6 (S38) Many kinds of trees may grow together in one area; they may be grouped according to similarities in structure and identified by specific characteristics.

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