This is part of my Fifteen Minute Focus series, and offers an introduction to 8 common plants found in western Washington.

Start with a song, then show the kids either samples of the real plants, or read a picture book about the plants, then do a craft. An optional extension would be to read a book – but that will make it more than 15 minutes!

Song

Our preschool goes on a hike each season where we notice seasonal changes. Since our fall hike is coming up, I’ve been teaching them a song at music time about some of the native plants we’ll see on our hike. The song is to the tune of Aram Sam Sam. You can learn the gestures, see a video, and find companion posters and book here. The words are:

A Douglas Fir, A Douglas Fir.
A tiny little mushroom and a Douglas Fir.
Salal, and Sword Ferns.
A tiny little mushroom and a Douglas Fir.

A Red Cedar, A Red Cedar.
Some Oregon Grape and a Red Cedar.
Big Leaf Maple. Blackberries.
Some Oregon Grape and a Red Cedar

Meet the Plants

If you have access to all these plants, bring in a sample of each to class. Spend time exploring them all and talking about them. You can read the picture book I wrote that has brief info about each one.

Douglas Fir – a Mouse Tale

Check out this picture of a pinecone from a Douglas fir… what do you notice?

There is a traditional story (possibly indigenous – I live in the ancestral and current lands of the Duwamish tribe) that tells the story of a forest fire where the mice were fleeing and couldn’t run fast enough to evade the flames, but the Douglas fir encouraged them to dive inside its cones to hide, and you can see the mouse tails and back feet there to this day.

Craft Ideas – choose one

• you can do leaf rubbings of salal, sword fern, red cedar, big leaf maple and oregon grape leaves – you can do leaf rubbings with a q-tip on aluminum foil or with crayons on paper. (If you use crayon, you can also the paint over it for a watercolor resist project.)

• make mushroom prints – I’d use store-bought mushrooms rather than wild-gathered for this – you can take off the stems and make spore prints (this is an overnight project!!) or just cut mushrooms in half, paint the cut side, and print on paper

• make a maple tree collage: draw out tree trunks on paper for each child (or print a picture of a line drawing of a maple tree in winter… like this), then give children small cut up pieces of tissue paper in reds, greens, and yellows – they crumple them into little balls and glue them on (if your students aren’t great at glueing yet, they could do a sticky paper collage – cover a drawing of a tree trunk with clear contact paper with the sticky side out)

• make a Douglas fir and a red cedar: Use cut out brown paper or cardboard or newsprint to build the trunks – show the kids the picture below so they can see how the Doug branches are up high and the red cedar are lower down, and use green dot markers or finger paint a variety of shades of green to be the needles of the doug / leaves of the red cedar
  • some geeky plant details (more details than I’d share with a preschooler): western red cedars are faux cedars – a real cedar has needles, western reds are cypress trees and have soft, scaly feather-like leaves; a Douglas-fir is not a real fir – it’s an evergreen.

Books

None of these were the right match for my group this year, but if you want a book about trees, you might like:

Picture a Tree by Reid. Talks about all the practical ways and creative ways people might view a tree. Quite nice – watch this video to preview it.

Stand Like a Cedar  (video preview). “Award-winning storyteller Nicola I. Campbell shows what it means “to stand like a cedar” on this beautiful journey of discovery through the wilderness. Learn the names of animals in the Nle7kepmxcín or Halq’emeylem languages.”

Big Bear Hug (affiliate link) by Oldland– video. This is a silly book about a bear who likes to hug everything – he sees a man about to chop down a tree, and tries to hug him, which frightens the man away. It’s fun and silly, but the bear does not ask for consent before hugging, so you might want to comment on that. (Here’s books about consent.)

Call Me Tree / Llámame árbol– video – by Gonzales. “An imaginary bilingual English/Spanish tale of self-discovery told by a child who grows, learns about the natural world, embraces others, and is free to become who they are meant to be–a child as unique as a tree.”

There are lots of great multicultural books about trees are listed here: https://mirrorswindowsdoors.org/wp/seing-the-woods-and-the-trees/