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I was a Cub Scout den mother for 10 years.  Week after week I would have to come up with fun games and crafts to keep 8 rambunctious boys occupied.  If you don’t keep them actively engaged, well, they’ll quickly create their own harrowing entertainment.

One of my favorite activities was the yearly Easter Egg Scavenger hunt.  This was not your normal Easter Egg hunt, but a game of clues and hide-and-seek.  The boys loved it, and I quickly adopted it for my own family. This is best for children over 8 years old who can understand the instructions and figure out the clues.

The first activity of the evening was to cook and dye eggs.  This messy but fun activity was cheap and easy following the steps in How to Make the Perfect Hard-Boiled Egg and How to Dye Easter Eggs.  However, for the egg hunt, use plastic eggs that you can fill with candy and clues.

Before the meeting, think of all the places in your home that you could hide an egg. These need to be places that you could describe in a clue, like:

  1. Go to where your cookies bake nice and brown (oven)
  2. Kitty meows for more every morning (food dish or pet food container)
  3. Tick tock, bong, bong! (grandfather clock)
  4. Dad watches his football here every night (recliner)

The older the child, the harder the clues can be. Be creative and think of some fun places to hide your eggs:

  • Fins, tail, and gills have I (Float one in the fish tank in a ziploc baggie)
  • Use one of these to eat your peas (In kitchen utensil drawer)
  • I’m a tree that grows inside (In a ficus plant)
  • Dad prefers black; Mom like cream/sugar (Inside the coffee maker)
  • Around and around in circles I go until down for the night (Under the dog bed)
  • Look in the shirt of the one you love (In your own pocket!)

Then, hide the eggs for when the children arrive. For every child, fill the plastic egg with treats and the clue to where to find the next egg. So for example, in the above list, give the child the #1 clue which leads them to the oven. In the oven is an egg with clue #2 in it which leads them to the food dish.  There, they’ll find an egg with clue #3 which leads them to the grandfather clock, and so on. Each child follows his or her own sets of clues.

case-lookrandom%To make it simple for a group, assign each child a unique color egg, and tell them they can only collect eggs of their color. That way if they accidentally find someone else’s egg, then it won’t break the chain of clues for the other child.

I had such fun thinking of places to hide, and the appropriate clue.  They had a blast finding the eggs.  Some will need help figuring out the riddle but that’s OK.  It also slowed down the usually fast and furious hunt, and also allows all the children the same amount of eggs in the end.

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