Because it was the weekend, it was time for the monthly gathering of Nadine's special club - the Cape Breton Young Naturalists' Club. Nadine and her friend Chantal just started it a couple of weeks ago, so everything's all new and exciting. If you want to hear more about the club, you can listen to Nadine talking all about it on the radio. Make sure your speakers are turned on!
We stopped at the Farmers' Market to buy samosas and hot chocolate, and then we were off. Nadine is a teacher, but her classroom is the whole outdoors. I wish that every school could be like this. She teaches kids the names of the different trees, what animals live in what kind of woods, and how to stay safe in the woods. Today we were going to learn how to recognize some of the trees in Nova Scotia.
At first I felt shy, but the kids in the club were so friendly that soon I knew everyone's names. The first thing we learned was how to tell deciduous trees apart from coniferous ones. Well ... I knew that was easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Coniferous trees have needles and deciduous trees have leaves. Deciduous trees lose their leaves in the winter and coniferous trees lose theirs in the fall.
We stopped at the Farmers' Market to buy samosas and hot chocolate, and then we were off. Nadine is a teacher, but her classroom is the whole outdoors. I wish that every school could be like this. She teaches kids the names of the different trees, what animals live in what kind of woods, and how to stay safe in the woods. Today we were going to learn how to recognize some of the trees in Nova Scotia.
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| Buying samosas at the market |
At first I felt shy, but the kids in the club were so friendly that soon I knew everyone's names. The first thing we learned was how to tell deciduous trees apart from coniferous ones. Well ... I knew that was easy-peasy lemon-squeezy. Coniferous trees have needles and deciduous trees have leaves. Deciduous trees lose their leaves in the winter and coniferous trees lose theirs in the fall.
Oops ... it wasn't that easy after all. We learned about a kind of tree called a tamarack. In October its leaves turn yellow and fall off ... but it's still a conifer. Oopsy ... trees are more complicated than I thought. There is a big grove of tamaracks planted at the Mallorytown exit on Hwy. 401, but I never knew what they were before. Look for them next time you drive to Kingston! We also learned how to tell white pines from all the other kinds of pines. Their needles always come in bunches of five, which is the same number of letters as in the word "white". Can you please check out the trees in the playground at Vanier and tell me whether they're white pines or not? Another tree I learned about was the balsam tree. Nadine says that they make the very best Christmas trees, because they don't lose their needles the way other trees do.
All that talk of Christmas made me feel all excited and tingly inside. I asked Nadine if she had any Christmas books I could read. It turned out that she had all sorts of them. I read them all to Léo while we snuggled up on the sofa. (I didn't need help with any of the words except "Nicholas". Did you know that Santa's real name is St. Nicholas?)
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| I'm all ready to help decorate the tree! |
On Sunday we picked out our Christmas tree. It smelled all fresh and Christmasy. It was a bit prickly to climb, but I managed. It was my job to help string the Christmas lights so that they didn't get tangled. Léo's papa is from Ecuador (that's where the picture on the wall beside the tree comes from), so some of the ornaments were made from dough.
Just in case you're wondering what dough ornaments look like, they aren't like cookie dough or bread dough. They're hard and look more like something made out of special clay. You wouldn't want to eat them, either! Here are two of Léo's ornaments. I wonder if I could make something similar out of plastercine? I think I'll go try.
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