Acorn gathering Coloring Pages

Autumn woods are full of treasures

Acorn gathering is a fun autumn event held from October to November in parks, woods, and on field trips with your kindergarten or elementary school.
Did you know that there is no tree actually named "Acorn"? Nuts from beech family trees, like sawtooth oak, konara oak, Japanese stone oak, white oak, and Japanese chinquapin, are all called acorns.
Because of this, acorns have completely different shapes depending on the tree. You can see this really well when you gather them and line them up!

The hat has a name: "Cupule"

The rough hat sitting on top of an acorn has a special name: cupule.
The cupule is a hardened part that protected the nut when it was a flower. It wraps around the nut while on the branch, and when it ripens, the nut drops right off.
When you look at the ground, you can find nuts with hats, nuts by themselves, and hats by themselves all scattered around. This coloring page shows all three kinds!

How to tell sawtooth oak and konara oak apart

The acorns you find most often in parks are from sawtooth oaks and konara oaks. Telling them apart is easy!
Sawtooth oak nuts are big and round. Their cupules have fuzzy, thin, beard-like pieces sticking out.
Konara oak nuts are long and shaped like eggs. Their cupules have a fine pattern that looks like tiny overlapping scales.
If you pick up one of each and put them side by side, you can spot the difference right away!

Sawtooth oak acorns take 2 years to grow

Actually, sawtooth oak acorns take two full years from when the flower blooms to grow into a nut.
In the first autumn, they stay as tiny spots through the winter. Then, they finally grow big and fall in the second autumn!
Konara oak acorns grow in just one year, so different trees in the same woods take different amounts of time.
When you think about how the acorn you found might have spent two years growing, it feels a little extra special, doesn't it?

Check for bugs when you bring them home

Sometimes, baby bugs live inside acorns. If you leave them alone for a while, they might chew a small hole and come out!
To stop this, it is a good idea to boil them in hot water for about 5 minutes, or freeze them in a bag for about 1 week on the day you pick them up.
After that, dry them well in a breezy spot. Then you can make tops, balancing toys, or maracas, and play with them for a long time!

Change the colors for the caps and the nuts

The secret to making your acorns look great is to use different colors for the caps and the nuts.
The nuts are shiny brown, and the caps are more of a grayish brown. Just changing these two colors will make them look so real!
If you leave a little bit of white in the middle of the nut, it will look smooth and shiny.

Draw the lines one by one for sawtooth oak caps

The fun part of drawing a sawtooth oak cap is its busy, prickly look.
Instead of coloring the whole shape in, try tracing each line one by one with your pencil.
For Japanese oak caps, try using dark brown and light brown one after another along the scale pattern. You can show different textures even with the same brown color!

Do not make all the acorns the same color

If you color all the acorns on the ground the same brown, they will look flat.
Dark brown, regular brown, light brown, and a slightly reddish brown. Try to place about four different colors so they are not right next to each other. This makes it look like a lot of acorns have fallen!
It is fun to add one or two green acorns, too. In real life, some acorns fall while they are still green!

Change the leaf colors for each tree

Sawtooth oak leaves are long and jagged, while Japanese oak leaves are wider at the top like an egg. Let's use different colors for these two leaves, too.
Dark brown for sawtooth oak, and yellowish brown for Japanese oak. If you add yellow ginkgo leaves and red maple leaves, it will look just like the ground in a forest!
If you color the ground itself lightly with light brown or leave it white, the acorns you gathered in your Acorn gathering coloring page will really stand out.

If You Find Twigs with Leaves on the Ground, a Bug Did It!

In autumn, you might find small green leafy twigs on the ground with acorns still attached. Why are they there when there was no strong wind?
This is the work of a beetle called the mealybug weevil.
The female uses her long mouth to make a hole in an acorn, lays an egg inside, and then cuts off the twig. The baby bug grows by eating the fallen acorn, then digs into the ground to spend the winter.
People think she cuts the twig to make the acorn fall to the ground faster. If you look at where the twig was cut, it is as sharp as if a knife cut it!

Are Acorns Too Bitter to Eat?

Acorns from sawtooth oaks and konara oaks have lots of tannin, so they taste too bitter to eat as they are.
But acorns from Japanese chinquapin and Matebai oak trees have very little tannin, so you can eat them right after roasting them! They taste a bit like small chestnuts.
We know that people in the long-ago Jomon period washed the bitter acorns in water to remove the bitterness, ground them into powder, and ate them.
Acorns were one of the main foods in very old Japan!

The Name Comes from a Spinning Top

There are a few stories about where the word "donguri" (acorn) comes from.
A famous story says it comes from the spinning top that you spin to play with acorns. People say that "tsumuguri," an old word for top, changed over time and became donguri.
When you write donguri in Japanese kanji characters, it means "round chestnut."
Even today, sticking a stick into an acorn to make a top is a popular fall game!