Trees Please!

I was gifted a special book during the holiday season by Miss Meghan, teacher in the Bees, Dragonflies and Beetles classes. The book she gave me is called Teaching The Trees. It was written by Meghan’s college professor, Joan Maloof. Joan teaches biology and environmental studies at Salisbury University. She shares many interesting and exciting facts about trees in her book, but she also lets us in to her emotional connection to them. Joan says “Even if we cannot name the species of trees around us we still feel their magnificence, their presence. We know that the world would be a less wonderful place if we no longer had towering trees to walk under, but we don’t often think about what we would lose along with the trees.” I highly recommend reading Teaching The Trees. If you have the same response that I did, you’ll begin to appreciate trees as individuals and more than just, well, the trees.

Trees are essential to our existence. They give us food, shelter and clean air to breathe. Trees are a huge part of all of our lives and we rely on them a lot at The Nature Preschool. Here are some thoughts the children shared with me about how they feel about trees:

Isaac – I can get maple syrup and sticks from trees. Trees are tall.
Soren – I can collect up leaves.
Thatcher – Giraffes like eat the leaves of trees.
Emmet – Dinosaurs eat trees.
Eva – Sometimes I get apples from apple trees. Trees grow from roots.
Sophia – What I know about trees is that in the fall, the leaves fall off. In the summer they suck up the dirt, it goes all the way up through the branches and makes leaves.
Adella – I like to make a tree house and swing in trees.
Lyla – I can climb and swing in them.
Flint – They have leaves and branches.
Sam – They grow bananas.
Adaelia – There is so much bark and so much sap in maple trees.
Brody – I like when the leaves fall down, it looks like it’s snowing.
Tommy – Trees give us acorns.
Owen – Trees give us air.
Julia – I like that we get to climb trees.
Catherine – They grow fruits.
Hazel – They have wood and smell good.
Ronald – They have leaves.
Anisten – I like licking trees.
Nora – I like the maple syrup ones.
Annabelle – I like singing a song to them.
Fiona (the flying squirrel puppet) – I like climbing on them.
Haley Jo- I love the branches with leaves.
Miss Nancy – They provide shade during hot summer days.
Bryn – Trees have sap.
Faye – I can climb them.
Brody R.- They feed us food.
Lisen – You can climb up them.
Gavin – Apples grow on trees and so do bananas.
Hattie – Sometimes they can make you itch. They have leaves that rot to soil.
Cyrus – When they die, they turn to soil.
Miss Erin – They talk to each other using root microbes.
Adam – Some pieces of bark are hard and turn to fossils.
Otto – Playing batman in trees is fun.
Dinosaur Puppet – They grow.
Flynn – Sometimes when they fall down we climb on them like steps.
Eliana – We get sap for pancakes and waffles.
Owen – Trees give us sap.
Miss Monica – Trees give us shade.
Xavier – Maple trees have sap.
Raina – I like the opposite tree.
Vinny – Sometimes I bump into trees.
Izzy – I like maple and opposite trees.
David – Squirrels take dirt to trees