Let’s play Hungry Squirrel

Play a game to learn how squirrels find and save food to survive in the cold winter woodland.

Materials

• Wooden acorns or pompoms of different colors (other items work too! Use what you have–different pasta shapes, etc.)
• Bowls/cups to “cache” food in

Before You Play

• Scatter “acorns” (or whatever object you are using as your acorns) around the room or throughout your yard.
• Ask, “How do you think squirrels find food throughout the winter?” Have a conversation about their answer. What makes them say that?
• Tell them that today, we are going to play a game to model how squirrels find food so they can survive the winter.

How to Play

1. Assign each squirrel (player) one of the bowls as their spot to cache (or save) their food for the winter. Have them choose a location to leave their bowl–their homebase.
2. Explain that it is the fall, and there are a lot of acorns falling from the trees. Acorns are one of the things that squirrels eat, so they are going to go out to collect some acorns one at a time–squirrels can only carry so much!
3. Set a timer for 2 minutes and have squirrels collect as many acorns as they can and bring them to their cache. Remember, squirrels can only collect one acorn at a time!
4. When the timer goes off, go back to your cache and see how many acorns you have in your cache. If you can eat 5 acorns, you’ve survived the fall. It took a lot of energy to collect those acorns. If, after your fall feast, you still have 5 acorns in your cache, you have enough to survive the winter.

Extension

Introduce predator prey relationships by having a coyote tagger who is trying to catch squirrels to eat!