Friday, February 27, 2009

X Marks the Spot

Treasure hunts are a beloved tradition in our family. My mom did them for us when I was small.

I use them to inspire the kids to read.
Greta asked for one. Her clues are single consonant-vowel-consonant words.


Here she is looking for the clue by the bug.



She found it!


Sounding it out.



Finding the next clue in the nut bowl.


The prize at the end!



The real prize:
Getting, one day, to read about anything that interests you.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Cute!

Anonymous said...

And how crazy that what she wants to read is "Animal Traps and Trapping"! That is one curious girl you have there. I'm looking forward to going to her for beekeeping advice.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I just noticed: did you switch from Blogspot to Blogger? Suddenly it's so easy to leave a comment!

Stefaneener said...

My kids love those. What a good idea. Maybe I could buy some prime grading time with one. If I didn't count the prep time. . .

Susan said...

Ev was disappointed that the book was historical (the history of traps) rather than practical. She wants to be left in the wilderness to survive on her own, so she says she needs to learn to hunt and trap animals to eat. I am very curious about whether she would really do it.

Oh, and I got rid of word verification because a bug was preventing people from posting. We'll see what happens with the spam. So far, so good.

Susan said...

In the pursuit of buying time for myself I did a treasure for Clem and a friend that included codes (a simple alphabet shift of one letter, but I gave them no hints so they had to figure it out on their own).

You could also scramble the words in the clue, or use anagrams of important words that they have to unscramble.

Math riddles like this stretch out the hunt:
http://www.mathriddlebook.com/index.html

I just thought of another idea...make your clue and make list of words that start with the same letter as each word in the clue, in order. Make a word scramble where each word in the list goes across and each secret clue word goes down. As the find the words in the list they'll discover the clue words.


Oh, and this time I hid the clues better than I used to. They kept coming to me in despair, but I just sent them back out to look harder.

gina said...

Oh, I used to do those with my older two. I think I shall plan one this week for the younger set. :)

JeaneP said...

I still have the words for another go at it! Loved seeing the BUGs on your Blog. First time trying since I was not able to before - Fingers Crossed!