Glass Half Something
Life with Littles
Squirrel
We're learning about squirrels this week. Inspired by our many friends in the yard who started to dig into our leftover carved Halloween pumpkins, squirrels have been a long time favorite in our family. This week we painted with forks, played a game of Squirrel Memory in the yard and made a pumpkin pie! Join us!
All activities at Glass Half Something require parent supervision! Safety first, friends!
Books! Books! Books!
We spent more time on our activities this week than books and facts. Books on squirrels were surprisingly, and disappointingly, scarce at our library. Luckily, we're inundated with real world observation of the squirrel friends in our own yard and neighborhood which helped sell my kids on a week of squirrels, even without books for facts. Check out our games and activities for the week!
Here are our top picks:
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Squirrels by Steven Otfinoski
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Squirrels: In My Backyard by Lindsy J. O'Brien
Get Moving!
This week, we played a game of Squirrel Memory! Squirrels will cache up to 25 things an hour and remember the location of a lot of it. We found that fascinating! We thought it'd be fun to see how good our memories are compared to our squirrel friends. We played outside with pinecones first but found it was better suited for an inside activity. Inside, we could use anything to hide and not have to worry about what's safe for the animals.
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First, we grabbed "nuts" to hide. When we played outside, we wanted to be sure the "nuts" were identifiable but also safe for the animals. We painted a bit of peanut butter on them so we'd know which ones were a part of the game. Inside we used small beanbags from a toss game.
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The kids hid 10 "nuts" and worked hard to remember where they put them!
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The first round, they went searching for the "nuts" an hour later. Alexa helped with a "find your acorns!" timer! They found all of them and felt they could remember even longer!
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The second round, they went searching for their buried treasure two hours after hiding! It was much harder to find everything. In fact, we're still missing two.
If you can make it two hours and find everything, can you make it overnight? A week? How long could your littles wait while still finding all of their food buried for winter?
Summary
Squirrels are a fan favorite in our house. We recently moved from the Midwest to the East coast and continue to be fascinated by how many more squirrels we have here! We recognized and had names for our neighborhood squirrels before moving, and now there are dozens just in our own yard. How fascinating it is to see how different things can be within our own country. Back at our Midwest home, we had a very early frost one fall which froze many young squirrels in the area. A neighbor rescued two squirrels that had originally been born in our grill (yes, our gas grill on our deck) and were living in a massive Maple in our front yard. They found the squirrels had fallen out of their nest and needed help. I couldn't tell you where they took them but weeks later, those young squirrels were returned to our yard with nail polish on their ears to identify them. We saw them the rest of the winter as their hair grew, they plumped up and the polish wore off. What a crazy story for the littles to watch play out in our very own yard!