Buy Yourself 30 Minutes of Peace With the Alphabet Scavenger Hunt
The world you live in has shrunk dramatically over the past few weeks, which means anything that makes your space feel larger can play a critical role in helping you keep your mind up while you’re locked up with your kids. Take part in the Alphabet Scavenger Hunt.
With fully guided pre-preparation, you can buy yourself a solid chunk of critical child-free time. You can even hire your kids to help with the setup: just ask them to make a page with a blank line after each letter of the alphabet – think of it as a to-do list from A to Z. (I used hunting as a way to trick my eight-year-old son into doing his daily written assignment.)
Hence the rules are pretty simple: every child must find an element that starts with every letter of the alphabet. They can collect items in a shopping bag or laundry basket and add them to their A to Z lists.If you want to avoid a final cleanup, you can only ask them to identify and write down all (or all but a select few) of their selections rather than collecting them all together.
Before you let the kids go home, you can offer them a prize if they can successfully complete the hunt. At our home, we provided leftover M&Ms from Valentine’s Day, but we also considered adding a little tech time or taking the chores off their to-do lists (instead of an extra whiteboard for housework ).
Depending on the age and nature of your children, you can encourage them to work separately or to solve a problem as a team. If they would prefer to complete it on their own, make it clear that this is not a race: the goal is not for the hunt to end quickly or to create additional stress points. My kids worked together, and I quietly pulled my older daughter aside before we started and suggested that she let her younger brother lead their team.
Once they’ve found all 26 items, it’s time to show and tell. You are the final judge, and you can declare the hunt over or ongoing whenever you like. As an added bonus, this activity may well generate ideas for what to do later in the day; our kids have rediscovered a forgotten board game and a mountain of stuffed toys, which they later remade into an imaginary arcade.