Memories of a grade 1 squirrel / plant inquiry: “What is special about squirrels?”

The story of the time we set squirrel traps to try to catch ourselves a pet squirrel! This inquiry began with lots of learning about squirrels in the hopes that we could cleverly catch one, and then morphed into a plant inquiry when we learned how squirrels plant so many seeds by their scat and in their food-hiding spots. Cross-curricular connections to math (number, measurement, spatial sense), language, science, drama.

Read all about it below.

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Memories of a squirrel/plant inquiry: “What is special about squirrels?” 

Outside one day, a student was collecting little items that looked like small pieces of fried chicken with green bumps on the ends. We were very curious about what he had found, so we observed closely, did some research, and discovered that they were pinecone cores. We’d seen lots of squirrels running around our yard, and realized they must have been eating green pinecones/seeds from the pine trees and leaving the cores lying around. We looked at photos and videos of squirrels eating, which led to more research about squirrels’ teeth and other special parts of their bodies (like their claws and their umbrella/parachute tails). When we saw a video of someone who kept a squirrel as a pet, one student asked if we could try to trap a squirrel to keep in our classroom. Of course I said yes! Thus began our squirrel inquiry, which later morphed into an opportunity to learn a lot about plants.

Indoors, we made plans and then constructed our squirrel traps. We researched to learn about what squirrels eat and what their homes are like so that our traps would be enticing spaces for them. One special fact we learned about squirrels is that they are omnivores who eat all sorts of different foods. Outdoors, we collected seeds, berries, mushrooms, and insects for the traps. We also filled the traps with items we thought squirrels might like to play with. We watched the squirrels in our school yard every day to notice where they liked to run and hide. We even found one squirrel home - a drey. Students brought other foods from home, like bananas and corn cobs. (Our food collecting led to lots of math learning (number, spatial sense) related to pinecones, seeds, and other squirrel foods). 

Before we set our traps, we painted the outsides of them with images and words that would be appealing to squirrels (E.g. “Acorn Restaurant”). We followed squirrel tracks in the sand to a group of trees and that’s where we left our traps. We waited to see what would happen. 

We wrote about our experiences every day in our outdoor learning journals. While we waited to catch a real squirrel, we made toy squirrels to play with inside, that we imagined were our pets. We learned from the many nonfiction books we borrowed from the library and we loved reading funny fiction stories about squirrels too. We acted one fiction story out as a play, and wrote our own funny fiction story as a class about a squirrel who only ate candy!

We checked on our traps each morning, and although we never actually caught a squirrel, we know there was a lot of squirrel activity in them! They made big messes, cracked open our acorns, nibbled our mushrooms, and even stole a corn cob and hid it on a neighbour’s shed! 

One day our principal told us something special about squirrels: they are like accidental gardeners. They often collect food and hide it in multiple places, but sometimes they don’t return to eat it all, so the seeds that they leave behind end up growing later. We did some more research about this and also learned that squirrels’ ‘scat’ is full of seeds that will grow later too! Interesting! We made pretend scat and then needed to know how to find seeds outside. We looked carefully at plants to notice their different parts, and we found many seeds! We mixed them into the scat and planted it in soil. While we waited for our scat seeds to grow, students also wanted to grow other plants, so we created some little indoor gardens. We watched lots of time lapse videos online about plant growth, and these inspired some of our gardening experiments. We also did lots of counting and measuring math with seeds and plants.