An invitation to a 14 year old's birthday was exciting to my son. A Friday evening with friends, pizza, cake and ice cream. The highlight of the night was a scavenger hunt. My friend was short on drivers and asked if I would be willing to help her out. I had not planned to spend Friday night with a car load of teens. Not my cup o' coffee (or so I thought).
My son, being a teenager, was looking forward to a night of independence. I was looking forward to a quiet night at home. However, for my friend's sake, I was happy to go along and as it turned out, my son even wanted to ride in my car. I had never taken part in a scavenger hunt before.
Everyone (about 25 of us) had a blast!
There are a variety of ways to organize and or budget for a scavenger hunt. You could provide a certain amount of money to each team and see which group comes back with the most items. You could spend only the cost of fuel to send out teams each with a digital camera and list of items to photograph. Another idea would be to turn teams loose in a neighborhood with a list of items to collect and bring back to the base.
Our scavenger hunt was 3 teams each in their own cars with 70 minutes to go and take 15 pictures of items listed for us. We brought back an egg, flag, feather, blue rubberband, a dog treat and a mouse.
The cool thing was that when we got the teams back together, these teenagers, got to share what was found and accomplished. There was no Grand Prize and none of them seemed to notice. They had such a fantastic time of competition and working together that they truly seemed to feel the reward on the inside.
For that reason, I would gladly spend another Friday evening with a carload of teens!
I'm so glad to hear you had a good time. I remember doing things like this when I was a kid, I would have never thought the adults might want to be doing something different. It's nice to know maybe they did want to be with us.
ReplyDeleteThis is such a great idea. I am a volunteer
ReplyDeletewith other adults mentoring kids. This would be so fun to do with them. And its inexpensive--how great is that!
I remember doing a version of this when I was a kid. Our youth group leader made some really funny "actions" we had to do as our scavenger hunt. One I remember is we had to get a picture of a employee at a doughnut store taking a bite of a doughnut....we had so much fun doing that.
ReplyDeleteIt's so nice to read about good old fashioned fun...great creativity. Keep the fun ideas comimg, love to read about them!
ReplyDeleteWe did this with our kids in our youth group. They still talk about the fun times we had. Who would of thought that the best memories don't require much money - just a little creativity!
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