a week full of acorns

Our week full of acorn learning began with our trek through the forest this weekend. Although we've gathered acorns a few times already this autumn, we gathered a fresh stock and tried to find a variety of sizes this time.

Now that the acorn are easily separating from the caps, we left the acorns behind for our furry friends' nourishment and only brought the caps home with us to use for crafting and other projects.


Finn enjoyed taking a few acorn caps and arranging them in size order from smallest to largest.


We also measured a few of them by seeing how many black beans would fit in each one. Our smallest cap would only hold 3 black beans, whereas our largest could hold 13!


We needle felted some acorns in various colors.


And we glued them into caps to make colored wool acorns. (Finn really got into the smallest-to-largest arrangement.)


After they dried we placed them our nature table with some of the acorns we gathered late this summer.


We did some acorn coloring, drawing and writing.


We even cracked open a few of our older acorns to see the nuts inside. We wondered how our squirrel friends open the nuts to retrieve the edible parts since we use a nutcracker.


Finn wondered what the acorn meat might taste like, but I discourage his sampling since these acorns have been sitting on our nature table for a few months already.


We decided to roast some chestnuts instead and pretend we're squirrels while peeling off the chestnut skin. Our "acorn" substitutes were pretty tasty!


We borrowed several books on acorns and squirrels from the library and read Woody, Hazel and Little Pip many times over the week.


We decided to make our own Woody and Little Pip Acorn out of peg dolls, green material from our scrap basket and some acorn caps.


We even cut a leaf out of a watercolor painting for Woody and Little Pip to fly down from the tree.


And down they flew over and over. I think we read this page about 20 extra times, just for practice. ;)

What a fun week of acorn exploration!