Yesterday PK went on a second hike. Before we left, we expanded our hiking experience by reading a wonderful book called A Log’s Life. It taught us about the life cycle of a log and all that happens in, under, and around them. We see lots of logs on the forest floor, so we were ready to use what we’d learned to make some observations!

As we started out we noticed pinkish clusters of seeds on the maple trees and stopped to look at them.

We learned what they were and how they could twirl down off the tree, so we took the time to pick up a few to try that out for ourselves.

Then we were on our way. As soon as we entered the woods, we saw an old tree that interested us. Part had fallen down and part was still standing.

We could tell that insects lived there now and the woodpeckers had come to find them.

Spring in the forest is beautiful. We saw ferns growing by the stream and even found pretty pink mountain azalea.

Just like in our book, we saw the fungi that grows on fallen logs…

and we saw a very crumbly old log breaking down to eventually become soil.

And we were amazed to witness a swarm of termites emerging from another old log! We had read about these too.

It was a great hike and so much of what we saw related to what we had read. We really learned a lot!

We headed up the hill and out of the woods to go back to our classroom. We were ready for snack!

As we walked back to our room, playing with our shadows, we talking about all that we had seen.

We had started from our classroom, so this was our longest hike to date. We did an amazing job and we’re ready for more adventures!