Easter comes at such a beautiful time of year with lambs, bunnies, lovely spring flowers and warmer weather to enjoy. If weather permits, it’s great fun to bring your Easter Egg hunt outside, and re-brand it with a treasure hunt twist, if unfortunately, the weather isn’t nice, you can make the treasure hunt indoors.
We have a family tradition of an Easter Treasure Hunt in the afternoon. All the cousins get together to search for chocolate treasure. Before that can occur, the Moms get together to draw up the clues (and enjoy a glass of wine). We come up with around ten clues & each clue points the children to a different location.
The Hunt begins at home, when the kids are handed the first clue. If you have young kids, stick with easy clues so that they can figure out where they are meant to go. For older kids, it’s fun to make the clues into riddles or rhymes that are more challenging so that they have to think through where they need to go. For example, for younger children, you could hide a clue in the mailbox and write, “find your first clue where the postman makes his delivery.”
Once they figure out the clue, they run to the first place (ie: the mailbox), and if they are correct, they will find another clue hidden there. That clue will in turn, lead the children to another location where they will find another clue. You can have as many clue stops as you like, and have them run around near or far, or just indoors. A good rule of thumb for a group is that they need to stick together, and work as a team so that the younger ones don’t get left out of the fun. At the final stop, we hide a basket of treats for the cousins to share. The clues and treasure need to be hidden in advance without the kids seeing.
If your children aren’t reading yet, you can create a fun treasure hunt using a map. I draw a map of either the inside of my house or the outside (depending on weather), with a view looking down from the sky. Then, mark X’s where I hide things for them to find. They can examine the map and figure out where each X is located. It works best to have a treat or something for them to find at the location of each X.
The Easter Treasure Hunt has become such a fun tradition for the kids and grown-ups alike! And, it doesn’t have to be limited to Easter. I make a treasure hunt for my kids birthdays too. Let me know how your kids enjoy it!
