Squirrels & Acorns Toddler Crafts

Use acorns for fall toddler crafts.

Teaching toddlers about squirrels and acorns is a good way to introduce them to the fall season. Through craft activities, toddlers get a hands-on feel for what acorns are and why squirrels love them so much. Get creative with your craft ideas to make your project stimulating and engaging for toddlers.

Acorn Painting

A simple craft for toddlers is to turn ordinary acorns into colorful ones. Set out bowls of acrylic paint colors, such as blue, green, red and yellow. Give the toddlers a whole acorn and show them how to dip the acorn's "hat" into the paint bowl by holding the main shell of the acorn and turning the acorn upside down. Give each toddler several acorns so that the toddlers can have an assortment of colors. Set the acorns to dry in an empty egg carton so that the tops of the acorns remain colorful.

Foam Squirrels

Provide toddlers with squirrel cut-outs made from tan or brown craft foam, along with foam acorn cut-outs. Using glue sticks, toddlers paste the squirrels and acorns onto a piece of poster board or construction paper. Give the toddlers crayons or markers that they can use to color around the squirrel and acorns to make a "scene." Or, provide toddlers with other types of foam cut-outs, such as cut-outs of forest trees that they can glue in the background.

Puzzle Craft

Give toddlers an image of a squirrel with acorns to color in using markers or crayons. Then, have the adult in charge of the activity cut out the image into jumbo-size puzzle pieces and shuffle them around. Give the pieces back to the toddlers so they can attempt to put the image back together again. Show toddlers how to match up the puzzle pieces based on the way they fit, their shapes and how the image matches up.

Squirrel Bag Puppet

Using a brown paper lunch bag, create a squirrel puppet. The flat and bendable bottom end of the bag becomes the squirrel's head, while the bag itself simulates the squirrel's body. Provide the toddlers with brown construction paper cut-outs of the squirrel's ears and bushy tail. The ears should be shaped like small triangles, which toddlers can glue onto the top of the bag using glue sticks. Then, the toddlers can glue the tail to the back of the puppet. Googly eyes can be glued down for the squirrel's eyes. Have the adults use more brown construction paper to draw and cut out the squirrel's arms and legs, and the kids can glue the pieces in place on the body of the bag. Have the kids glue tiny real acorns on the squirrel's hands.

References

• Oriental Trading: Fall Squirrels with Acorn Craft Kit