Little squirrels

We were taking a walk the other day through some of our favorite woods, kicking around some walnuts when my 4 year old asked, "how do squirrels break open the walnut?"  I was about ready to explain all the different techniques squirrels use to get the nut out of the shell when the science teacher in me cried out "wait....this would make a good activity!". 

So I said.....lets be squirrels for the day! (or more realistically - an hour)

So we collected walnuts in our neighborhood....

I let the kids decide (within reason) what they were going to use to try to crack the seed open and get the nut out.  Their weapon of choice....a rubber mallet and a board.  They did not use the board as I thought they might but it worked well just the same:

First to get the green "coat" off (as they called it)
Then a few hits to get the nut open.  They were harder to crack than any of us thought.  At first they had a hard time hitting it from dead on and the walnut would fly this way and that.  And the actual walnut was really hard to get out.  The kids all tried a bite and did not care for it so I saved a bowl of our walnut pieces for roasting.  We did not get a whole walnut but just peeled parts out....if we do it again I will have to look up how to get it out whole.  But I guess this was more true to the experiment.  I doubt squirrels get the whole walnut out when they are eating them.

The kids got pretty good at hitting the nut.  It became a game to see who could do it with the fewest hits.  Pretty soon they were getting through the coat and nut with one good hit. 

After a good 30 minutes of walnut hitting fun.  I asked the kids how they thought the squirrels did it.  Do they have a rubber mallet in the wild?  They thought that was funny.  They then proceeded to throw the walnuts down on the driveway to split them open.  It was tough. We had luck getting the green coat off that way but not breaking into the actual nut.  Luckily we have quite a few resident squirrels that could be seen chewing on the nuts all around the neighborhood. 

We came in and roasted the walnuts.  Tried a few but I think I over-roasted them a bit which is a big no-no (think battery acid taste) and the kids ran off to play barbies. 

The best part of the experiment is now when we go out on walks or hikes or even just walking to school the kids will just stop and watch the squirrels with a new found respect.  A "I can't believe that you can get that walnut open by yourself when we had to use a rubber mallet" respect.  The science teacher in me loves it!