Fun Facts about Christmas Trees and Christmas Tree Crafts

This time of year Christmas trees are starting to pop up all over (if they haven’t already been up for a month!) so it feels like a good time to share some trivia and fun facts about Christmas trees. Share these with your kids or in the classroom.

Evergreens were used as decoration in ancient Egypt and Rome, but the tradition of using an evergreen tree in the home as a Christmas decoration (lit with candles back then) can be traced to Germany and made its way to the United States in the 1800s. According to this post all about the history of Christmas trees from History.com, Martin Luther was widely credited as being the first to put candles on trees.

The first records of Christmas trees being used in America were in the 1820s, and they were used by Germans in Pennsylvania. The use of Christmas trees on both sides of the Atlantic began to take hold when Queen Victoria was sketched with her family around a Christmas tree.

Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states, and the iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has been lighting up New York City since 1931. The first lights were added to the tree two years later, and now the tree has more than 50,000 lights.

According to the National Christmas Tree Association, between 25 and 30 million real Christmas trees are sold in the United States every year. About 350,000 acres are used for growing Christmas trees in the United States, and generally three seedlings are planted for every tree that is harvested. The average growing time for a tree to become big enough to be a Christmas tree is seven years.

Oregon, North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington are the top tree-growing states. When it comes to artificial trees, 80 percent of them are made in China.

Now that you know a little bit more about Christmas trees, how about some Christmas tree crafts? Check out these posts for some fun projects with a Christmas tree theme:

Faux stained glass Christmas tree craft
Life cycle of a Christmas tree
Make a 3D tree from a piece of paper
Christmas tree slime recipe
Roll a Christmas tree printable game
Christmas tree cutting fine motor activity
Pompom Christmas tree craft

Did you know that October is Squirrel Awareness Month? I didn’t know we needed more awareness of these little creatures, but let’s take it as a sign to learn more about squirrels!

Let’s start with some fun facts via Kids Konnect: did you know there are five subfamilies and more that 280 species of squirrels? The smallest are pygmy squirrels and the largest, the Bhutan giant flying squirrel, can be longer that 4 feet (1.2 meters).

Tree squirrels can climb down trees so fast because their ankles can rotate 180 degrees, allowing them to grab the tree bark as they go down. While most squirrels don’t survive their first year of life, they can live five to 10 years in the wild and squirrels have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity!

Rhythms of Play has more fun facts and tips for observing squirrels if you want to add some real life nature to your nature study.

We always like to start these collections with life cycle and parts of the animal printables, so let’s grab the squirrel life cycle an parts of a squirrel worksheets from Montessori Nature. (It doesn’t look like these are free any more but they have a whole unit study on squirrels you can buy that includes life cycle and parts activities, characteristics of different kinds of squirrels, a printable poster, information about predators and more.)

Grab the squirrel lapbook printable (free with email address) from Homeschool Share to learn the parts of a squirrel, where they live, what they eat, whether they hibernate and more. There’s also a nut taste test printable, a place for making observations about squirrels, life cycle of an oak tree, games and more.

Simple Everyday Mom has some cute squirrel themed worksheets including tracing the letter s, labeling the parts of a squirrel and a letter s maze. She also has more activity pages with a squirrel theme, including matching, a more traditional maze and a counting and graphing activity.

Work on letter recognition with this squirrel and acorn game printable from Teaching Mama. I love the idea of hiding the letters in a fall themed sensory bin for kids to find, identify and match to the letter on the worksheet.

For older kids you can do this “if I were a squirrel” writing prompt from Lesson Planet.

And throw in a little counting with these squirrel and acorn tens frame printables from JDaniel4’s Mom, which you can use to count real acorns or any other little fall themed thing you have handy.

Have you read?

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