Barb’s Green Hour Challenge this week was to have a picnic. Now this challenge was right up my kids alley. As soon as the weather gets moderately tolerable, they start begging to have picnics. Their first choice is to have a picnic at the park, but if I don’t go for that, they will settle for the back yard. For this challenge, since it was our first “official” picnic of the year I wanted to go somewhere fun. Thanks to one of Sonja’s blog posts, I had heard that Red Butte Gardens was having a free day for Arbor Day, so we decided to head up there to check it out. I am so glad we did. Spring is just barely starting to make itself evident in our neighborhood. Our tulips have finally started to think about opening. You can see the color around their closed heads, but we still don’t have much life here yet. When we got to Red Butte Gardens, the first thing we came to was a patio area with this beautiful tree in full bloom and thousands of daffodils all around.
We thought this would be the perfect spot for our picnic.
The kids hurried and ate and then got to the real business of the day, exploring. As we headed down the paths, our first discovery was this butterfly.
It sat there for a long time and let the kids get up pretty close to observe it. Next, we found a neat path through the trees that the kids just had to take.
A neat surprise was that throughout the Gardens they had “Exploration Stations” set up for the kids to learn all about trees. At the first station we came across we finally got to use the magnifying glass, since I never did find ours. They had slices of different tree trunks that the kids could investigate. They counted tree rings and saw the effects of fire and insect damage on trees. This was probably the boys favorite station.
We learned about leaves,
and seeds,
and all-in-all, had a wonderful day being out in the beauty of spring!
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