Scavenger Hunt Activities to Promote Learning
Extended hands-on activities that come in the shape of a fun scavenger hunt are packed with tons of early literacy benefits. Spur on your child’s learning with these great scavenger hunt ideas!
What’s not to love about a good scavenger hunt?
Scavenger hunts are not only a great way to keep children (or adults) busily entertained, but they also offer great opportunities for exploration and movement, help develop a host of important skills, and can create lasting memories.
What is a Scavenger Hunt?
A scavenger hunt is a fun and engaging game in which participants search for hidden objects and/or collect miscellaneous objects. What makes them so appealing is that they are extremely versatile.
Scavenger hunts can be:
- Indoors or outdoors
- Conducted in a single room or an entire town
- Played as individuals or in teams
- Adapted for small or large groups
- Competitive or non-competitive
- Played by young and old alike
- Time-restricted or open-ended
- As simple or elaborative as you want to make them
Are Scavenger Hunts the Same as Treasure Hunts?
Treasure hunts are slightly different from scavenger hunts in that they typically involve following a series of clues, working your way through various puzzles, and/or following a map to guide you to the ultimate reward – the grand treasure (whatever gets picked as a reward). Whereas scavenger hunts often have a list of items to find and/or collect or actions to complete. Sometimes prizes are given to the individual or team that is most successful but can also be played for sheer fun. While slightly different from each other, scavenger hunts and treasure hunts are often talked about interchangeably.
Awesome Scavenger Hunt Ideas for Young Children
1. Nature Scavenger Hunts
Nature scavenger hunts can be easily created and adapted for any location. They are great for getting children outside and enjoying nature! They make a great camping activity, liven up a regular day at the park or hiking trip, or get children exploring their own backyard in new ways. There are countless benefits of outdoor play. Read this father’s personal account about the benefits of nature scavenger hunts noticed in his son and suggestions for what makes a successful nature scavenger hunt to get more inspiration.
There are so many great learning opportunities you can take advantage of when creating a nature scavenger hunt. Scavenger hunts make a great extension activity. It’s great if the scavenger hunt ties into a lesson that children have been learning, for example, insects. Children can connect their learning through what they are finding and observing while they ‘hunt’.
If children are collecting items, these can later be discussed to help build on vocabulary and language concepts and give the opportunity for children to ‘show and tell’ their items building their expressive language and presentation skills.
Nature Hunt Theme Ideas:
You can keep a nature hunt general or pick a theme, perhaps tie it into a science unit your kids or students are doing or any nature-themed reading you are doing. See the following ideas below.
- General/Mixed
- Study of Insects
- Animal Habitats
- Animal Specific (Birds, Sea Animals, etc.)
- Signs of the Seasons
- Plants and Trees
- Textures in Nature
- Sounds and Smells of Nature
- Colours in Nature
- Beachcombing
- Pond or Lake
Tips for Nature Scavenger Hunts:
When setting up the ground rules, safety, and perimeters for a nature scavenger hunt, you will want to discuss some of the items that should not be touched or collected, such as animal scat, bird nests, poisonous plants or mushrooms, etc.
Avoid the temptation to turn a nature scavenger hunt into a nature tour and teaching lecture. The wonderful thing about scavenger hunts is how they allow children to explore and learn through hands-on experiences and where they can learn through trial and error.
Scavenger hunts help children develop important skills that can be applied in many areas of life. You can learn more about the benefits of scavenger hunts on children’s learning by clicking on this link.
Nature Scavenger Hunt Tools and Equipment:
You don’t need much to pull off a successful nature scavenger hunt, a basket or container for collecting, a list of items to find, and being dressed appropriately for the outdoors are all that is really needed for a simple nature scavenger hunt. However, there are a few other items children could learn how to use and incorporate that can add another element to their fun little adventures.
- Pair of binoculars
- Insect net
- Magnifying glass
- Plant press
- Backpack
- Specimen Set
- Test tubes -water sampling
- Walky-Talkies
- Wipes/Sanitation napkins
2. Photo Scavenger Hunts
Photo scavenger hunts require participants to have a camera or smartphone. Instead of collecting things, individuals or teams need to take pictures of various things or at different locations… and often the more creative, the better! These pictures can then be turned into a slideshow for everyone to watch and laugh over together. Photo scavenger hunts are a great choice for larger groups.
Here are some photo scavenger hunt ideas:
1. Landmarks & Poses Photo Scavenger Hunt:
Create a scavenger list of different types of poses and a list of different landmarks –participants can choose which pose they want to pair and check off with each landmark.
2. Letter Photo Scavenger Hunt:
Participants need to take photos of items starting with a chosen letter of the alphabet. Prizes go to the most interesting, unusual, and artistic/creative photos. This is also a great activity to do with young children as a way of introducing letter sounds to help them build their letter knowledge, an important pre-literacy skill.
3. Shape Photo Scavenger Hunt:
Children can practice their shapes by looking for them in everyday items, helping build their shape-recognition skills. This is a good way to also build flexible thinking skills because they are learning to spot shapes outside of the typical format first learned. This can be a great little introduction to early physics. For example, you can point out the triangle-like shapes in many bridge designs that help make them strong and other design implementations where shapes are highlighted.
4. Colour Photo Scavenger Hunt:
Similar to the shape hunt, children can learn and practice their colours by hunting for colours in everyday objects. Young children may start to notice that all stop signs are red and all traffic lights have red, yellow, and green lights. This is a great activity to tie in with colour experimentation activities and learning colour patterns.
3. Rhyming Picture Hunts
This type of scavenger hunt has children learning and practicing their rhyming. Rhyming builds phonological awareness, which later helps with learning to read and write. The aim of this scavenger hunt is for children to find the rhyming word partners of the words on the scavenger list, which can be either in the form of pictures or words depending on the age of the participants.
You can find instructions for this activity under rhyming games in our post on Fun Rhyming Activities for Children. You will also find a free rhyming bingo game available for download and the cards are easily adaptable to use for this scavenger hunt.
4. Compound Word Picture Hunts
Help your little one(s) learn compound words, this can be at home, at school, out shopping, or while out for a nature walk. Learning compound words is an important aspect of vocabulary development for children and helps them understand the structures of the English language and can influence future reading comprehension skills.
Compound words can be long words for children to spell out, take grasshopper as an example. However, learning to break down compound words into their individual components, makes them easier to spell.
A compound word scavenger hunt is a simple, fun, and effective way for children to learn new compound words and is one of many compound word activities you can do with your child or student to build their vocabulary and language skills.
Why not have students search for compound words in the classroom, such as whiteboard, notebook, paintbrush, paperclip, bookcase, highlighter, classmate, and backpack.
Or when you go grocery shopping, you might have your child search for grapefruits, pineapples, blueberries, strawberries, watermelon, eggplants, peanuts, applesauce, oatmeal, popcorn, meatballs, and cupcakes.
You can get our FREE Nature Compound Word Scavenger Hunt, which is one of three free scavenger hunt printables available for download by clicking on the picture below.
Get 3 FREE language and literacy-building scavenger hunts!
Includes:
1. Compound Word Nature Scavenger Hunt
2. Indoor Descriptive Words Scavenger Hunt
3. Alphabet Letter-Sound A-Z Scavenger Hunt
6. Rainy-Day Indoor Scavenger Hunts
Rainy days can have you scratching your brain and searching the internet for activities to do with your kiddos. Why not get them doing an indoor scavenger hunt or treasure hunt? These can keep them excited and busy for a solid chunk of time and also get siblings working together when they’ve had enough of each other and don’t want to play nice.
Here are some rainy-day scavenger hunt ideas:
1. Find That Book! Scavenger Hunt
This scavenger hunt is great for helping build your child’s understanding of how print is another form of communication and a way of conveying information, a preliteracy skill called print awareness.
Write out clues about your child’s book collection or favourite books. Start with one clue that leads to the first book. Your child will look inside to find the next written clue leading to the next book. The clue in that book will lead to the next book, and this will continue till all the books have been found.
You can have your child stack the books that get found together and after the last one is found, have him or her pick a couple to read together.
You might also consider helping your child organize the books in some way, maybe large, medium, and small, by colour, fiction or non-fiction, or
You could also work together to search the titles, looking for books having the first letter of your child’s name to strengthen their letter-recognition skills.
2. Indoor Descriptive Words Scavenger Hunt
Scavenger hunts are great for reinforcing new language and vocabulary. You can take them even further in this direction by placing an emphasis on language concepts, like this one, which helps build children’s descriptive language skills and has them searching for things described using adjectives like soft, blue, squishy, flat, tall, and fluffy.
Simply write out some cards or create a little scavenger checklist with a list of objects children can find around the house that fit descriptions using adjectives. For example, one of the list items might say, “Find something that is spotted”. For very young children, you may want to give one or two examples or show pictures to help them determine what the adjective means. For the previous example, you might say, “Find something that is spotted like a leopard or dalmatian puppy.”
Your child will have fun running around trying to find something that fits the description and piling them together as they are found. These language-focused scavenger hunts can be especially great for children with language and communication challenges and for second-language users.
After you are finished, you can go through each item and have your child describe them using some of the same words from the scavenger hunt and adding new ones that fit the object well. This will further reinforce these vocabulary words and get them to practice using adjectives which is an important skill for writing, storytelling, and effective communication skills.
You can get our FREE Indoor Descriptive Words Scavenger Hunt, which is one of three free scavenger hunt printables available for download here on this post.
7. Extended Scavenger Hunts
(Scavenger Hunts That Take Place Over a Longer Period of Time)
1. Summerlong Animal Photo Scavenger Hunt
This is a summer-long photo scavenger hunt. The aim is to capture photos of as many different types of animals as possible. The specific name of each animal type can be looked up as these pictures are collected and made into a list or you can make a list beforehand and see how many of them you manage to capture pictures of.
Later these pictures can be combined to create a little personalized animal vocabulary book that can be reviewed and enjoyed by everyone. Pictures can even be signed by the participants who took them.
This book can also be turned into a great literacy tool for young children to further develop their early literacy skills. One quick and simple idea is to have your child give each animal an alliteration name. Take, for example, a picture of a goose, the alliteration name could be Gabriella Goose.
Alliteration is a great way to help bring attention to the initial sound of words and build your child’s phonological awareness. Take this naming activity a little further and introduce adjectives into the name, like Gabbing Gabriella Goose. These animal characters could later be used for sentence writing and/or story writing inspiration!
Let the fun begin! Happy Hunting!
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Hi, I’m Julie, the passionate creator of Ox & Owl Literacy. I enjoy empowering families and educators with wonderful resources to inspire fun, imaginative, and joyful learning opportunities for young kiddos. You’ll find lots of recommended books, reading resources, and creative learning activities on this site aiming to help children fall in love with language, books, reading, and the transformational power of stories.
