This week we ventured to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens, part of Duke University. I planned several scavenger hunt sheets so that our children, who usually range in age from 1 to 8, could all participate in some way.
Because the temperature was supposed to get into the mid-90s, we met at 9 AM. After arranging our meeting places and picking up maps, we headed out into the 50+ acre garden.
While I was excited about searching out different items with My Little Man and then discussing them with the group as a whole over a picnic lunch, I was very excited to introduce my friend Noelle to our group.
Noelle has been honing her photography skills for years and agreed to take pictures of our children while we hunted throughout the garden. Because this particular garden is so diverse and has so many fountains and special features, it makes the perfect place for special pictures.
(If you would live in our neck of the woods and would like fabulous pictures of your children or next event, you can check out Noelle’s blog. Contact her for more information!)
We’ll have Noelle’s pictures back soon, but you can see some of the topics for the various scavenger hunts. We didn’t do all of these, but we found pieces of them all ….
For those of us doing the number hunt, we found a plant with ONE main base.
For those people doing the color search, we found an animal with RED wings.
We found a rock that could be used like a chair, just as Jessie did in The Boxcar Children, for those people doing the literature hunt.
We found SPHERICAL flowers, a shape needed on the shape hunt.
Of course, all that hunting made us very hot and thirsty ..
It was tempting to just step right off those stones …
but we stuck to our water bottles, instead.
If you would like to take these scavenger hunts outside yourself, you can find copies of them here.
Have you done an old-fashioned scavenger hunt lately? What interesting things can you find in your backyard or local park?
