Pine cones

We collect pine cones from different trees. I love the way my boys, just learning to talk and put two words together say, "pine cone." They always say it with such glee and excitement, whether they have just found a cone on the window ledge, or in the grass outside, or perhaps they are picking it up and putting it in their bike storage compartment as treasure. Pine cones are wonderful.

We have been finding various uses: from adding them to the sandbox,putting them in and dumping them out of dump trucks,making spinning tops, to counting- even though two is our highest number. Since my boys are learning Spanish they usually go- "uno, dos...dos pinecones."

There is a debate in nature education about how much information to give children. Do they need to correctly identify something or is it enough to know that a bird is a bird or a pine cone is a pine cone despite its individual differences? Currently my philosophy is a balance. I will present things with a both general and specific names and allow the children to choose how to name it. Most importantly we will look for differences in things. For example with pine cones which is a general group of cones and can be from various trees in the pine family we notice which ones are big, little, have "mouse tails" or are pointy. We practice the art of observation, perhaps the most basic skill of a naturalist or scientist. Whether my children say this is a cedar, a douglas fir, or a larch cone at this time makes no difference to me. However, I will use the more specific name when I tell them something special about the cone.

Often naturalists tell the story of the mouse tails and why you can see them in a douglas fir cone. There are many versions of this story and several picture books as well. I think this works wonderful for older preschoolers, but for my young children I think it is just fine to let them know that pine cones can be seeds, they can be food for animals, and that they can fall in the forest. Lately we have been reading The Ancient Tree in the Forest a beautifully written book by Carol Reed-Jones and illustrated by Christopher Canyon. My boys come up to me and say "read." However they don't want me to read the whole book, just the page with the martin almost getting hit by the falling pine cone and then occasionally the next page where the perspective changes and now the cone is small and the tree big.