We Appreciate The Squirrels 🤷🏻♀️
You know I don’t do thematic units but ever once in a while we get excited about celebrating certain days. So far this month we have celebrated international popcorn day and today is squirrel appreciation day. I’m not sure how we should show appreciation to squirrels but we certainly gave it a whirl.
We talked about squirrels and where they live and what they do during the day.
We made a chart. I wrote the things that we wonder about squirrels.
These charts are a great way to help the children understand that print has meaning . It also gives attention to punctuation marks! We noticed that every time we ask a question we put a ???? at the end of the sentence. Those little squiggly lines sure draw attention.
We went on a squirrel hunt today.
Elijah remembered from the other day on our walk that he had seen a squirrel’s nest. We looked up on the Internet to see what a real squirrel’s nest look like and we took off.
We saw birds nest.
A Bird’s nest is much smaller than a squirrel’s nest. We thought it was funny that a squirrel might try to roll up in a tiny birds nest and go to sleep.
On our walk we found many squirrel’s nest high in trees
They are easy to see this time of year when all the leaves are down.
We also found places that squirrels have been playing. There were opened walnuts and acorns everywhere.
Also our walk we also saw a really strange growth in the tree. What is it ?
We walked past one pine tree that had teeny tiny pinecones. They were so much smaller than the pinecones we have found in the past. Anna loved that it would fit in the palm of her hand.
When we got home we took our two new squirrel feeders and investigated. We wanted a good place to hang them.
We had to really think and use our cognitive skills because we did not have a ladder in the yard so we had to be able to reach the branch.
It seemed like all of the branches near the bottom of the tree were small and breakable. Eventually we found two places to hang our squirrel feeders. We hope the squirrels visit them especially on days we we are out.
We also took an idea from the Explorers Curriculum ( Astate) and hung a rope very tight between two trees. It will be fun to watch the squirrels balance across the rope to get to our feeder .
Have you ever seen squirrel obstacle courses that are on YouTube? We watched a couple today and they are hilarious.
I think we did a pretty good job of appreciating squirrels today. We learned a few things along the way. We learned where squirrels eat and sleep and play. We learned what squirrels might eat. We learned how to look things up on the Internet that we do not know. We learned that our thoughts can be written down on paper by using letters. We recognized some of the letters on the chart that go in our own names. We realized that each of the things we wondered about had a ??? At the end . We learned where it’s safe to walk. We learned that squirrels start with S.
Since I’m in a huge discussion on my personal Facebook about work sheets -now would be a great time to remind you that many traditional schools would have celebrated this way.
Peace out !✌️