Squirrel's Stash — Hide Now, Find Later

The child is a squirrel who hides five “acorns” around the home, goes off to do something else, and comes back later to dig them all up from memory. A playful way to practise the everyday skill of remembering where you put things.

  1. Gather five acorns — walnuts, pine cones, bottle caps, or five small toys.
  2. Agree the forest. One or two rooms, with clear no-go places (nothing high up, nothing in the kitchen or bathroom cupboards).
  3. The squirrel hides them one at a time, in five different spots. You follow along and watch — your job is to be the forgetful old squirrel who needs help later.
  4. Teach a squirrel trick. At each spot the child stops, looks at the hiding place, and says it out loud — “One is under the blue cushion.” After the last one, tour the spots once more in order.
  5. Winter comes. Leave the room and do something else for 10–15 minutes — a snack, a story, a trip outside.
  6. Spring! The squirrel returns and collects the acorns. Before moving, ask “How many can you tell me before you look?” Then they fetch them.
  7. Stuck? Don’t point. Ask “Where were you standing when you hid it? What did you do just before?” and walk the route again together.

Variation: Play the real-life version any time something goes missing — instead of finding the lost shoe for the child, retrace the steps together (“You had it when we came in… then you went to wash your hands…”). Or hide the acorns in the garden or a corner of the park.

Requirements

  • Space: One or two rooms, a garden, or a small defined area of a park
  • Surface: Not applicable
  • Materials: Five small objects to hide (nuts in shells, pine cones, bottle caps, small toys)
  • Participants: 1 adult + 1 child; two children can hide for each other
  • Supervision: Moderate — adult follows during hiding and sets safe boundaries; light during the wait

Rationale & Objective

“Recalls where they left a toy or object” is one of this subdomain’s examples, and Teaching Strategies GOLD Objective 12a begins with exactly this kind of memory for hidden objects. DeLoache, Cassidy & Brown (1985) used a hide-and-seek task to show that even very young children do deliberate things to keep a hiding place in mind — looking back at it, pointing, naming it — and that these are the first seeds of memory strategies. This game makes those seeds explicit — look, say it aloud, walk the route once more. The retracing prompt in step 7 comes from Wellman, Somerville & Haake (1979), who studied how young children search for an object lost in a real environment and reason from where they last had it — a logical, step-by-step kind of search that develops across the preschool years. Five locations held over a real delay also gives spatial long-term memory a proper workout, and the pay-off is practical — a child who can find their own shoes.

Progress Indicators

  • Early: finds 1–2 acorns from memory, then searches at random or checks the same spot repeatedly; cannot name the places before looking
  • Developing: finds 3 of 5; names some hiding places aloud when reminded; needs the adult to walk the route to recover the rest
  • Proficient: names 4–5 hiding places before moving and collects all five after a 10–15 minute wait; uses “say it aloud” without being told
  • Advanced: finds all acorns after several hours or the next day; retraces their own steps to find a genuinely lost belonging; can find acorns that someone else hid while they watched

Safety Notes

  • Set firm boundaries before hiding — nothing above the child’s shoulder height, no climbing on furniture, no ovens, washing machines, cupboards with cleaning products, or anywhere a child could get shut in
  • Whole nuts and small caps are choking hazards for children under 3; use larger objects if a younger sibling is around, and avoid nuts entirely if anyone in the home has a nut allergy
  • Count the acorns back in at the end so nothing is left to be found by a baby or a pet
  • Outdoors, agree a small area you can see all of and check it for litter, dog mess, and thorny plants first
  • Frequently misplacing things is completely normal at 5; it is only worth mentioning to a professional if it comes with wider difficulties in remembering, following instructions, or finding the way around familiar places

Hints

  • Playfulness: wear a scarf as a tail, scamper, chatter. The adult plays a rival squirrel who has terrible memory and keeps asking the child for help finding its own acorns
  • Sustain interest: change the story — a pirate burying gold, a dog burying bones, an Easter bunny. Change the forest too (a different room, the garden, Grandma’s house)
  • Common mistake: rescuing too quickly by pointing or saying “warmer, colder.” Ask where they were and what they did instead; the retracing is the skill
  • Limited space: hide all five within one room, or even within one piece of furniture (a bookshelf, a chest of drawers) — small spaces with similar-looking spots are actually harder
  • Cross-domain: position words — under, behind, inside, between, next to (spatial language); counting found and still-missing acorns (early subtraction); drawing a simple treasure map of the hiding spots (symbolic thinking)
  • Progression: 3 objects, 5-minute wait → 5 objects, 15-minute wait → 5 objects found after lunch or the next morning → 7 objects → child watches you hide them and finds them later → child draws a map straight after hiding and checks memory against it

Sources

  • DeLoache, J.S., Cassidy, D.J. & Brown, A.L. (1985), “Precursors of mnemonic strategies in very young children’s memory,” Child Development, 56(1)
  • Wellman, H.M., Somerville, S.C. & Haake, R.J. (1979), “Development of search procedures in real-life spatial environments,” Developmental Psychology, 15(5)
  • Teaching Strategies GOLD — Objective 12a (Recognizes and recalls; looks for hidden objects; uses strategies to remember)
  • Schneider, W. & Pressley, M. (1997), Memory Development Between Two and Twenty (2nd ed.)
  • ASQ-3 — Problem Solving area
  • HighScope — Key Developmental Indicators for spatial awareness and for reflection (children reflect on their experiences)