Pirate Bounty - DIY Scavenger Hunt

The ice cream of the week is Pirate's Bounty. This is a flavour by Island Farms. It is a rich licorice flavoured ice cream with a black licorice flavoured ribbon and crunchy butter toffee pieces. When we think of pirates, we think of treasure maps and hunting for that treasure so we thought that a fun DIY craft would be making up a scavenger hunt. Growing up you’d have scavenger hunts at school and often at birthday parties. Everyone had their own ways of doing them so we are going to share with you some ideas and a couple tutorials. We’re gearing our ideas towards kids and teens, but I also think that doing a scavenger hunt as an adult would be loads of fun too. You can tweak the ideas that we are sharing to make it fit your type of scavenger hunt.

Ideas:

The most obvious way to set up the scavenger hunt is by making up a map of the location that you are going to have your hunt in. Whether it is outside or in, you can draw up a map and mark a big X where the treasure is. Depending on how creative you are, you can make it as detailed or as simple as you’d like.

Another way to do a scavenger hunt is to give picture clues that will lead to the big treat or treasure at the end. For younger children you can take an obvious picture of the place/item where the next clue is hidden, but for older kids and adults, take more close up and obscure pictures so they’re harder to find. You can draw these clues or take photos and print them out.

We took a picture as an example...this is 

A common scavenger hunt idea is to write riddle like clues which lead to more clues which will eventually lead to the treasure at the end. Think up easy clues for the young ones and harder more difficult clues for older hunters.

We made clues out of cardstock and we made them little envelopes with pirate shapes on them.

one is a bit more fun and there’s more to it. Make up a list of items, maybe a few different lists (you can give everyone the same list, everyone can have different ones, or some have the same and some different) and then get all the participants to find these items. It’s fine to do this one indoors (collecting things like pencils, forks, cotton balls, fruit or something blue), but it might be a more exciting outdoor scavenger hunt idea (collecting things like rocks, shells, leaves, pine cones or something soft). Give everyone buckets or bags or something to collect everything in. Whoever finds everything on the list first, wins the prize/treasure.

A cool more inventive idea for a hunt would be to make you own puzzle. You would collect puzzle pieces at each location after you solve the clues and then once you have all of the pieces, you’d put the puzzle together which would show you the location of the treasure. You can buy a make your own puzzle kit online or you can take a photo of the location of the treasure, print it on thick paper or cardboard, and then cut it into puzzle pieces.

Tips:

Give your scavenger hunt a theme. A popular one is pirates of course, so if you go with this you can get the kids to dress up, have decorations around all to do with pirates, have pirate “snacks,” and print all of your clues on pirate colours of paper with pirate embellishments.

Figure out how you are going to do your treasure. You could arrange it so that everyone gets some treasure at the end. If it is at birthday party, have goody bags as your treasure. Or if want everyone to go hunting solo with their own clues, you can have a big prize for the first one to find the treasure, and if you’re super nice, little treats for the ones that follow.

Something to keep in mind when planning your scavenger hunt is to decide where the treasure is going to be and then work backwards hiding everything else and coming up with the clues.

Make sure you take into consideration the age of the children or people hunting. Don’t make it too difficult if it’s a scavenger hunt is for five year olds!

Make sure that your clues aren’t too vague. For instance if you’re giving a hint about a great place to find a snack, then that could mean the fridge or the pantry so try and be specific with your clue.