Looking for easy ways to keep your kids busy? These scavenger hunt ideas are perfect! They’re something that I’ve used a lot with my own kids and from how popular they’ve been I know that they’re something that a lot of readers have used with their own children and in classrooms too.
There are all sorts of ways that you can do scavenger hunts with children, from online hunts to help keep them connected with friends and family to outdoor activities to help them engage in the nature around them to even hunts to help find birthday gifts!
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Scavenger Hunt Ideas
Scavenger hunts are great as an educational activity, as way of keeping in touch online or just as a boredom buster.
Our scavenger hunt ideas are all linked below and there’s lots of them for you to try out with your child. Scroll below for hints and tips for how to make your game fun and a success! Make sure that you check back regularly as more printable scavenger hunts are added to this site.
What is a Scavenger Hunt?
A scavenger hunt is a game where participants have to find specific items. The list of items can be written down or given to the players verbally (more likely to be the case with online scavenger hunts such as those on Zoom)
Scavenger hunts are often done as teams with people competing to be the first ones to find all the items but you can totally do them just as individuals just having fun too. My kids have done the outdoor scavenger hunts below outside just as a fun activity with no competitiveness and they can be a good way to make simple things a bit more interesting too like doing a nature scavenger hunt while you are out for a walk.
You can also do educational scavenger hunts such as finding items or answers in a book.
How you do your scavenger hunt is up to you and will depend on the interests of your child, but hopefully our ideas should give you a good place to start and our printables are great for making your activities quicker and easier to set up.
How do you do the scavenger hunt clues for kids?
How you do the clues for your scavenger hunt will depend on what kind of hunt you are doing and the age of your child.
If you are doing an online scavenger hunt then you will need someone to read out the clues or the item to find. We recommend where possible using a separate online account for this (zoom etc) so that your kids don’t peek all the questions over your shoulder. This is totally the kind of thing that my kids attempt.
For younger kids such as toddlers, preschoolers and kids in early years education it’s great if you can have a picture of the item as well as the words next to it. This can help when children aren’t old enough to read yet or with word recognition. Some of our printable scavenger hunts also give children the opportunity to colour in items that they find.
For older children written clues are fine. Depending on the hunt this can be looking for specific items or clues as to what they need to find.
How many clues can a scavenger hunt have?
This totally depends on the attention span of your child and how hard each item is to find but as a guide I like to do around 10-20 clues in a scavenger hunt.
Ultimately you are looking for a scavenger hunt that will keep your child engaged but not so long that they start getting bored of it.
What do you need for a scavenger hunt
One of the main bonuses of these is that other than our free printables there’s not much that you actually need to get! For our colour-in sheets some colouring pens or pencils are obviously helpful as is a pen.
If you are heading outside then it might also be fun to grab some binoculars and a kids camera can be great for photo hunts
Printable Scavenger Hunts for Kids
St Patricks Day Scavenger Hunt
Outdoor Scavenger Hunt for Toddlers