My challenge for you today is to create your own dichotomous key for the leaves in your garden.

Watch my video to see how to do it.  

What you will need:
A pile of different leaves
Paper
Pen

How to do it:
Take your leaves and divide then into two piles based on a characteristic.
Next look at one of those piles at a time and see if you can divide the pile again using a different characteristic. You may look at the shape of the leaves or the texture or any marking such as veins or edges. Once you have made more sub set continue to try to sort each pile into smaller and smaller set by different characteristics.
When you have finished you should have one leaf in each pile at the end of the key.
Take your pen and paper and draw arrows to the sub sets and write the characteristic you have used to sort the leaf by. Continue with all your sub sets until all the branches of you key have been labelled.

Now you have your own dichotomous key for the leaves in your garden.
You could then look up the names of the plants using a published dichotomous key online or in a book and add the names of the leaves to the bottom.
Take a photo of your key and keep it as a tool to identify leaves in other locations.
You could even share it with someone else in your house to see if they can use it to identify a leaf they picked in your garden.

I would love to see your dichotomous keys so please tweet your photos #Naturedays or @DawnNaturedays or on the Nature Days Facebook page.