Open Woods Scavenger Hunt

DESCRIPTION
This is an outdoor activity loop and scavenger hunt the children design in advance of a holiday or birthday party with the goal of delighting others in the community with riddles and rewards—candy, when it’s a COVID-safe Halloween Scavenger Hunt.

BIG IDEAS
  1. Creativity is born into each human being.
  2. Practicing natural creative abilities allows children to create community by designing a scavenger hunt in a woods, yard, or park, and writing riddles guiding others to find stations of “surprise” rewards.

PURPOSE
A scavenger hunt is a creative place-making and community bonding activity. It empowers children to transform a space with an activity that others act out, and through directions they give in the form of riddles that children compose for others to decode. For storycrafting skills, this workshop develops a sense of authorial vision to transform a familiar space into a new and exciting interactive game.

ACTIVITY
  • Introduce the children to the idea of a scavenger hunt.
  • Decide on a theme: Halloween is easy. The surprise is Halloween candy that in the COVID-19 year is safer to get outside in the woods than trick or treating, all bunched up on people’s steps or porches.
  • Explain children’s imaginative power to transform space. Right now it’s a woods. Soon it will be a kind of game board people walk through.
  • Explore the woods to identify 6 or so “surprise stations.” In the Halloween model, they are DIY candy dispensing stations.
  • Discuss directions to explain to people how to find those stations.
  • Write riddles to communicate directions.
  • Draw a map to help scavengers find it.
  • Set up stations, make copies of riddle sheets and maps.
  • Design marketing and public service announcement posters of the day and hours of your Community Scavenger Hunt, and distribute.

WRAP-UP RECAP
Arrive 1 hour early to set up your scavenger hunt and “practice” the loop. Have the adult lead children in a Group Marvel: “Look at the change we made! We made this woods into a different kind of fun, welcoming space that people of all ages will seek out and enjoy! We did it by using our planning skills and empathy to envision what people would need to know to decide to do this. Then we used our storycrafting and artistic skills to make it—we made trails, set up stations, stocked them with candy, and provided riddle sheets and maps.”
AGES: Preschool-grade 4
TIME: 1 hour; highly flexible

​MATERIALS NEEDED
  • A woods, yard, or park
  • Concept for ~6 surprise stations that reward the riddle decoder: trick or treat, for example
  • Materials for the surprise stations you design; At Halloween, we tied clear plastic recycled salad greens boxes to trees and put candy in them
  • Pen, pencils, and markers and paper to write riddles the children compose and for drawing maps needed to help people find the surprise stations