Scavenger Hunt Culminating Activity

The children in our church are particularly fond of hunts. We have limited space and are surrounded by a public graveyard, so we've had to get creative with scavenger hunts. We have found that the plastic Easter eggs that are prevalent in early spring are quite useful in this regard. They are small, brightly colored so that they aren't easily lost, and can be hidden outdoors beforehand since they seal (this doesn't hold if you use food, though- squirrels eat through the plastic in 20 minutes).

One way that we used this was in our culmination activity of our beatitudes study. We color coded each clue so that everyone was looking specifically for certain things. We handed out paper bags that we had coded with marker to remind the children what they were looking for. We pre-stuffed the eggs with beatitudes stickers I found from Smile Makers. The children hunted. You could hear them yelling out clues to each other and making sure that everyone was taken care of. (We had 50 children outside ranging in age from 4 to 13.)

Once the hunt was over, they had different activities. The oldest group put together a puzzle of all the beatitudes. The upper and early elementary kids worked with invisible ink to illustrate the beatitudes. (Lemon juice is great for this.)

Other materials you can use for hunts are plastic zip-top bags (very good for older children), clean yogurt containers, small, clean water bottles, and cardboard egg cartons (they blend into surroundings very well). Using a mixture of the materials is useful if you want to level the search so that it can be done with many age levels at once (for example, zippy bags for the oldest children, plastic eggs for the youngest). You can also level the activity by having the children search in different ways (the oldest have to do it with their eyes closed while someone calls out hints, the middle children have to hop on one foot, and the youngest children have to help the others).

My own two children are quite fond of searching for things in our backyard after dark. I send them out with flashlights and their sand buckets for their collections. Our poor collie gets quite confused by this, but one good dog biscuit, and she's a happy pup.

Have you used hunts? Let us know what you've found out!