Science Sunday - Nuts

As a last second thought, I grabbed a scoop of mixed nuts in their shells, as we passed through the produce section at the grocery store yesterday, for a very simple Science Sunday activity, today.

When I was a child we always had a bowl of mixed nuts, with a nutcracker sitting in the middle of the table around Christmastime. We don't generally buy nuts in their shells now though, and since there are not many nuts growing around our area (there are a few nut trees hardy enough to grow in Montana, but not many do), the children are not that familiar with nuts, beyond the chopped and bagged variety I sometimes buy for cookies.

I thought it might be fun to test their knowledge, by shelling the nuts, and placing a few with nuts still in their shells...


...to see if they could recognize which nut went with which shell, and if they could name them.


Once we had the nuts organized, I demonstrated to the children why I had not put out a shelled Brazil nut. Those things are impossible to crack without pulverizing the nuts inside!


After that, Science Sunday deteriorated into a debate between the Man of the House and myself, as to the correct name for the hazelnut. He was pretty sure it was a filbert, and I was pretty sure they are the same thing. It turns out that a filbert is a variety of hazelnut, so filberts are hazelnuts, but not all hazelnuts are filberts - go figure.

It's great to be a homeschooler.