A Really Cool Leaf Project

Lydia had another school project. (I never did post about her "Animals in our Backyard" project, but it was really cool!) This project was about leaves. She was supposed to make a display. I think we did something rather unique, so I'll tell you about it. We went around and collected a bunch of leaves, and pressed them in wax paper (inside a book, under a 50 lb weight. I'm pretty sure you don't need that much weight, but that's just what we did.) for about a week. Next we stuck the leaves between 2 layers of clear contact paper to sort of laminate them. We cut out around the leaves, and labeled them. I found one of those satellite maps of our neighborhood and put each leaf where we actually found it. We had a bunch more leaves that we pressed, but I'm no expert, and I didn't know what kind of tree they belonged to, so we didn't use them. If only my neighbor had been home when we were putting this thing together. He's an arborist. He could have identified them for me in a second. Oh well, we had all that the project required plus a couple of extras for extra credit.