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How to Create Clues for a Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunts provide a great avenue for youth and young-adult groups to get to know each other in a fun environment. Riding together in teams provides opportunity to talk and work together to find items. Friendly competition teaches teamwork and communication skills. Potential conflicts can even be teachable moments in learning how to respect each other and work out differences. Creating unique clues for scavenger hunts enhances the experience. A good group leader will not settle for the same scavenger hunt as the previous year. She will seek to make each scavenger hunt a new and fresh experience.

Instructions

- 1
  Come up with theme ideas for the scavenger hunt. Having a theme will give you instant ideas for clues for the hunt. Holidays such as Halloween and Christmas provide many ideas for a scavenger hunt. For example, a Christmas scavenger hunt can involve having a picture of one of your team members on Santa's lap, as well as a picture of your team under a Christmas tree. A spring scavenger hunt may involve having the color green as your theme; all clues must be green in color. Narrowing the focus by creating a theme stimulates creative ideas for clues.
- 2
  Write out riddles for your clues. Use a clever phrase or rhyme to share a clue where a scavenger hunt item might be found. The clues might all point to homes of parents of your youth, or business locations you have checked with beforehand. When the group goes to the home or business, they are handed the next clue in a riddle. This plan involves some more legwork, but adding the riddle element forces the team to work together more to solve the puzzle.
- 3
  Take pictures of your clues with a digital camera and print out your pictures on sheets for each team. The teams then drive around to find items that resemble the pictures as closely as possible. Award bonus points to the team that brings back the object that most resembles the picture.
- 4
  Create a clue list based on all the letters of the alphabet. This will give the teams 26 items to find and using this structure helps you think of clues by using the letters. You could give bonus points for multiple uses of the letter. For example, for the letter B, you say to bring some kind of bean. If a team brings back a bag of Boston Baked Beans, they should get 3 points, since they used the letter B three times.
- 5
  Record audio clues of your list and put them on a CD. Each team should have a CD player either in their vehicle or on a portable player to listen to as they drive. The audio clue shares a hint of what the next item will be, either said plainly or in a riddle. Having an audio list rather than a written list gives the scavenger hunt a different flavor, and allows you to be more creative in coming up with clues and sharing them verbally.

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