Fairy-Tale World of Pine : Education: Sixty Oxnard kindergartners get a lesson about Christmas trees while touring a 12-acre farm in Santa Paula.

Five-year-old Fernando Turrubiartes of Oxnard hopes Santa will bring his family a Christmas tree.

“I want a very tall and green tree, just like this one, in the living room at my house,” Fernando said as he touched the needles of a 10-foot-high pine tree while traipsing among hundreds of fragrant trees at a Santa Paula farm. “And I want a lot of bright balls and lights on the tree.”

Fernando is one of hundreds of schoolchildren who will roam the fairy-tale world of a pine forest this month during tours of Faulkner Farm.

Each December, about 1,500 to 2,000 children visit the farm, where they learn how evergreens are planted and grown, farm owner Lin Ayers said.

“A lot of the children don’t know where their Christmas tree comes from or how they grow,” Ayers said. The tours “give them a chance to have fun while learning about the trees.”

Breathing the aroma of pine and basking in the warm autumn sun, 60 kindergartners from Oxnard’s Rose Avenue School enjoyed their first visit Thursday to a Christmas tree forest.

The tour at Faulkner Farm began at 10 a.m. with a train ride in open-air boxcars around the 12 acres of the farm where the trees are grown.

As the red train whizzed through fragrant fields of Monterey and redwood pines, the youngsters loudly expressed their curiosity at the wonders around them.

“They don’t look like the ones on TV. They are very green,” said Manuel Cabrero pointing to the trees. But then he bent his head down and spotted a huge black spider crawling on a tree. “Look, look, the spider is eating the tree!”

After the 15-minute train ride, the youngsters wandered among the trees learning how they grow, produce seeds and how they are pruned.

Their teacher, Mary Jean Gallagher, told them that the seeds come from pods on the trees called cones and when the seeds grow they become baby trees, called seedlings.

“What does a tree need to grow?” Gallagher asked.

“They need water and sun,” said an excited Manuel. “And I think air.”

“That’s very good. But they also need soil and care,” Gallagher said. “And it takes four years for a tree to grow and be ready for a family to chop it up and take it home.”

As they strolled among the trees, the students also learned how to tell the age of a tree by counting the rings in a cross-section of its trunk.

While instructing the students to determine how old some of the cut trunks were, she said, “Every time we see you counting we’ll give you a hip, hip, hooray.”

And in small groups they went hunting for chopped trunks whose trees had already traveled to the living rooms of families.

“Quite often at their age, they are more interested in Santa than in trees,” Gallagher said as she watched the children. “But this group seems truly excited about the trees.”

Gallagher, who has taught in the Oxnard Elementary School District for 33 years, said the trips serve not only to expand the students’ cultural experience but to build their vocabulary.

“They really learn fast and this is the best way of teaching,” she said.

At the end of the one-hour tour, Fernando’s wish for a Christmas tree came true. Each of the students was given a live sapling.

“I’m going to plant it,” Fernando said, “and I hope it will grow tall just like the ones here.”