Last week during our EPIC planning session, lots of the children came up with interesting questions about trees, such as ‘Why do we have Christmas trees?’, ‘Why do some trees have different colour leaves? and ‘Where do conkers and acorns come from?. Today we used these questions as the start of a lesson. We talked about how we can find out what a tree is called by looking at the leaves. We used an identification guide to compare leaves and then read a non-fiction book about why leaves change colour in the Autumn. Then it was time to head down to Pontlliw park to find out which is the most common tree there. The children gathered their data using tallying and they discovered that the most common tree in Pontlliw park is the oak tree. When we got back to school we talked about the acorns that we saw, and then talked about other tree seeds such as conkers and sycamore seeds. We also discussed the evergreen trees that we saw and the children were interested to learn about the needles and why we use evergreen trees at Christmas time, rather than trees that drop their leaves. The children then used Hwb to show their findings in a bar chart.
