S1.E8: Scavenger Hunt! - Raising Thinkers Podcast

When I was a girl, from elementary school, and on through middle school, every Valentine's Day, my family had a tradition. My mom used Valentine's Day cards to write hints and clues for us to find around the house. From the upstairs closet where we stored the suitcases, to the cold weather extremes of inside the freezer, we had to follow the path from one clue to the next.  After we had gone through hint by hint, in the end, all the efforts led us to a prize! My parents designed this to be a fun family tradition, but an additional motive was to help my brother, sister and I develop teamwork and critical thinking skills. Honestly, I don't know if my parents thought about all of the ways that a scavenger hunt could be beneficial to us as kids, or if they thought it was just a fun activity, but it became a tradition that we loved!  

In the end, the prize was normally a family game. This then led to us being able to develop more of our communication and critical thinking skills as we played family games together.  I could go on further about the benefits of playing family games, but I'll save that topic for another day.

This is just one example of a scavenger hunt, but there are many different ways that you can design a scavenger hunt to develop your child's critical thinking and evaluation skills. One way is to do something similar to what my parents did, design a clue by clue scavenger hunt that leads your child around the house. First step, map out a plan.  Where in the house do you want them to go.  If you want it to take the most time, put the longest possible distances between subsequent locations.  Second, make sure the clues are clear enough to indicate the next spot.  Clues should be more simple for younger children and more cryptic for the older ones.  Then, you have to develop and write out each clue.  Finally, hide those clues in "goldilocks" spots.  Not too hard to find, but not too easy either... find that just right location.  Also, remember to hide those clues when the kids are asleep or not paying attention!

Another option is the typical checklist scavenger hunt. You can give your child a checklist with different items that you write out for them to find. This could be items that relate to their five senses, that relate to different colors, that relate to different sounds, it all depends on what you want them to be learning about in that moment.  If you have a child who can't read yet, you can make the list with pictures, or you can create the list and tell them that they need to go find one item at a time and bring it back to you. If your child is older and even has their own device, you can ask them to take pictures of the different items that they find. This can be done indoors or outdoors… for example, during a trip to a museum or even a trip when you're hiking up a mountain. There's lots of possible variations.  If you want to go one step further, the items that they have to find on the list, could be used in the end to make some sort of creation.

Throughout the process, not only will your child think from a different perspective at times, but your child will also develop their critical thinking skills such as evaluation, deduction, sorting, problem solving, and more. It's a lot of fun... I've done this with with my students before and it's definitely a fun learning experience for everyone.  Yes, it takes a little bit of time to design and put together, but seeing how engaged students are makes it totally worth it.

Now, you might be thinking that this is great, but you're the one who's doing most of the thinking by developing the scavenger hunt. It certainly does make you think and plan as the designer, however, you can also flip it around on your children. After they've done a few, have them design and develop their own for you or even for each other if you have more than one child. That gets them to go through that planning process of how one clue can link to another, or how they can even create a theme for a particular scavenger hunt developing their own checklists. Regardless of who's designing The Hunt, it is always exhilarating!