Adopt a Tree Journal for a Child and a Grown-Up

Your eight-year-old passes the same big tree on your block every morning and has started calling it "our tree." You'd like to turn that into a year of visits together, once a month, starting on Arbor Day next April.

A child and a grown-up pick one tree on their street and visit it once a month for a year, starting on Arbor Day, Friday, April 30, 2027. This 28-page journal gives the child room to draw, write and measure at a child's size, and gives the grown-up a line of their own on every page.

What is inside, in order: how the year works (page 2); an Our Tree page for the nickname, the place, a first guess and a big drawing (page 3); a page for measuring height with a stick and the trunk with string, with columns for April 2027, October 2027, February 2028 and April 2028 (page 4); leaf and bark rubbings (page 5); where Arbor Day began, with the dates January 4, 1872, and April 10, 1872, and the Nebraska City story (page 6); twelve monthly visit pages, April 2027 to March 2028, each with a prompt for the month, a drawing box and a box for the grown-up (pages 7 to 18); a four-seasons comparison (page 19); why leaves change color, with a place to color what your tree did (page 20); a two-page tree key built on three questions (pages 21 to 22); a guide to 20 trees with a leaf drawn by us for each (pages 23 to 26); a page for the grown-up to write about the tree they watched as a child (page 27); and the sources (page 28).

The tree descriptions are written in our own words from Virginia Tech's dendrology fact sheets. Arbor Day facts come from the Arbor Day Foundation and the National Park Service, fall color and measuring from the USDA Forest Service and university extension pages. All pages are listed in the book. This journal is not made by any of those organizations.

Prints on US Letter, with margins that also suit A4.

This printable was created with the help of AI tools, then checked fact by fact.

Made by Made for This Day — we wrote it, we sell it, and we answer for it.

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