Squirrel Activity when they visit the garden

Squirrel Activity for kids for when you spot them in the garden

Last week we investigated Hibernating Animals when we saw a Hedgehog on the way to preschool. This week we’ve been playing in the garden and have had a visitor to our bird feeding station that isn’t a bird – a grey squirrel. An autumn visitor to our garden who has discovered a liking for our peanuts that we put out for the birds. So here is a squirrel activity to extend our experience further.F So we took the opportunity to look at Squirrels – in the UK we have 2 different types of Squirrels the native Red Squirrel and the introduce Grey Squirrel, the Red Squirrel is endangered and been pushed out by the Grey Squirrel but both follow a similar pattern in the Autumn storing nuts to use for food over the winter. We then talked about what sort of nuts the Squirrel would eat – obviously peanuts as that is what we have on our bird feeding station, but we also looked some nuts on our nature table and the few acorns that we had found this year (3 – a lot of our Oak Trees have a fungus this year and the acorn yield is very small) so I took this opportunity to create a maths game for J that a squirrel would like to do as well.

Acorn Match Maths for Number Recognition

Materials needed for Acorn Match Maths

Two different shades of brown card Black Marker Pen Scissors

How to make the Acorn Match Maths

We are working with numbers 1 to 10 and recognition of them at the moment so I cut out an egg shape for our acorn and then used the first as a template to cut out another 9. On each of these I numbered then 1 to 10. Placing the Acorn on the other piece of card I drew a cup shape with a stalk that was bigger than the acorn and then cut it out – I used this as a template and then cut out and again numbered them 1 to 10.

How to play the Acorn Match Maths

Set out the acorns at the top in random order and then the cups at the bottom again in a random order and ask your preschoolers to match up the numbers on both. We have done this is order from 1 to 10 and 10 to 1 asking between each number what comes next and what comes before. As we match them up J has been putting them in order so looking at number lines and sequencing as well. Extensions that we will be progressing on to – Random Calling of numbers, odd and even numbers, 2 more than.

Autumn Visitor Book Link

Our Book Link this week is Nuts To You by Lois Ehlert – a great book by one of our new favourite authors after the fun we had with two of her books during the Virtual Book Club for Kids. Nuts to you! is all about a mischievous squirrel just like our garden visitor although in the city and the fun it has.   Here are some more fun activities to go with Nuts to You! and Squirrel’s to extend our activities further.

• Ready Set Read – Nuts to You! Activities
• Uncommon Commonness – Nuts to You!
• Growing Books by Book – Nuts to You!
• 3 Dinosaurs Grey Squirrel Craft