Then and Now - How old are trees?

Today we went into our beautiful forest beside CM for our group time. We brought special 'forest books', to draw and record what we found.

We wanted to know how old some trees are. One way to find out the age of a tree is to count it's rings, but the tree has to be cut down to measure this way.

To measure a tree a different way, you wrap a tape measure around the tree. This will measure the circumference. You use the circumference to find the diameter (circumference divided by pi (3.14).
Then you multiply the diameter by the growth factor.
Different trees have different growth factors. Cottonwood is 2.0, Maple and Oak are 3.0, Red Maple are 4.5, Cherry are 5.0, Dogwood are 7.0
I decided to take an average growth of 4.0, and use that for all the trees we measured. So our measurements are

We started with a VERY big tree. We looked at the features of the tree so we could draw it in our books. It's branches were so high up, so high that we couldn't use them to climb. We looked at the leaves. They were dark green and kinda pokey. How old would the tree be? (The tree was 94 years old)


We found a teeny tiny tree. It was smaller then all the children. We all guessed the tree would be younger then the children. (It was 2 years old)






We then measured a skinny but tall-ish tree. How old could the tree be? Would the tree be older then the children? (It was 7 years old)



We then found a gigantic tree that had many smaller trees growing out of it. Cedar group held hands and tried to stretch all the way around the tree. It was so big that we couldn't reach.













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