Skunk Potion (Group)
All Ages
Tell kids to imagine they were trying to create their own synthetic ‘skunk potion.’ What would they put in it? You should be in for lots of laughs as kids imagine all the worst-smelling things in their world.

Why Skunks Smell So Bad (Group)
All Ages
Why do skunks smell so bad? Pose this question to your class and get their creative answers. Is it because they don’t take baths? Because they’re farting all the time? Once you’ve exhausted their ideas, explain that a skunk’s smell is actually their defense against predators. Skunks are slow and small, so in order to avoid being eaten, they’ve evolved to be extremely smelly, sending the unambiguous message: ‘You don’t want to get anywhere near something as foul and unpleasant as me.’ When skunks feel threatened, they turn around, raise their butt in the air and point it at whatever scares them, and then shot out a spray of urine that smells even worse than they do. You definitely don’t want to get sprayed–it can take several days (and several baths in tomato juice) for the smell to go away.

Additional Questions for discussion:

• Has anyone (or anything) you know ever been sprayed by a skunk?
• If you were a wild animal, say a wolf or a buffalo, and you got sprayed by a skunk, how might this affect your life?

Tease the Skunk (Outdoor)
All Ages
Assign one child to be the skunk. Give them a clean spray bottle filled with water, and if you have it, some sort of black hooded sweatshirt or jacket. (Tape a white stripe down the back for added effect.) Also lay out a beach towel somewhere on your playground along with washrags and empty shampoo bottles.

To play the game, your ‘skunk’ lumbers about the playground as skunks typically do, while the other kids try to sneak up and get as close as they can without getting sprayed. But watch out: if you get too close, the skunk will turn around and give you a squirt! If kids get sprayed, they have to run back to the beach towel and pretend to take a bath to wash it all off before returning to the game again.