Ahh, sweet summer time. Quality time with your kids. Slow mornings with no school rush. Time spent together outside. Picnic lunches in the yard. Also, mild overwhelm and hearing “I’m bored” 87 times before lunch. (Throw in a rainy day and the train can really go off the rails.)
I’m someone who loves to slow down and not have anywhere to be on a timeline, but then I start to go stir crazy if I don’t leave the house with a goal in mind. I’m a complicated gal, ok? We obviously can’t do huge extravagant activities every day (cha-ching!), so I am always trying to come up with fun and new free activities. Playgrounds and parks are great, but sometimes the weather doesn’t allow those. We have a membership to the local science center, but some days I just don’t have it in me to do crowds.
Enter: scavenger hunts.
My girls have always loved a scavenger hunt. Often when I need to bribe them to go to the grocery store, I’ll sketch up a quick bingo card full of items to find in the store, and they’re magically more eager to go. We’ve also done a mall scavenger hunt that was so fun.
This week we had a crappy, rainy day and we all were losing our marbles. I decided to create a scavenger hunt that we could complete at Barnes and Noble! (Definitely a favorite destination for three bookworms like us.) Bonus, our B&N has a Starbucks…kids get an activity, mommy gets to walk around with an iced coffee. Win-win!
I made two versions so I could make one a little more difficult than the other for my girls’ different ages and reading level. Our oldest has always been a huge book lover, and our little has been making huge leaps in her reading skills, so this was a perfect opportunity to mix in a little reading practice with some fun.
I included things like:
- Find a book with shiny parts on the cover.
- Find a book that is part of a trilogy.
- Find a pop-up book.
- Find a Golden Dome award winner.
- Find a book with a map inside.
My 9-year old could be completely independent on this one, and once I read over the clues once with my 5-year old, she was able to look for the books on her list without a lot of extra guidance. Wandering the bookstore is a frequent activity for us, so they both know their way around the children’s department quite well.
You could easily do this scavenger hunt at a library as well and pair it up with a family story time or another summer library programming activity! Even though I planned this as a “free” activity for our day, the girls had some book money to spend, so it technically wasn’t a $0 activity. Completing this at a library would eliminate that “can I get this? How about this?” temptation.
Use this as a jumping off point to write your own scavenger hunt, or just print out the ones I already made and linked down below, cut them down the middle, and throw it on a mini clipboard! (I got ours at Walmart for a couple bucks.) The file will have both versions on one page, so just use the one that suits your kiddos best!
I hope you and your little ones have fun hunting around the bookstore, and you might even find some gems you hadn’t seen before! Do your kids like scavenger hunts? Give me an idea for another location to create one for!
little green pear 