A new Easter hunt challenge

I know this is a little late to be of use to anyone for this year, but given that I have the template files to hand from making these on Friday night, I should post them before I either loose them to the depths of my hard drive file structure, or just forget to blog about them altogether when Easter comes around next year. If I'm still around and posting this time next year then I'll try and remember to link to this again to remind folk that it's here.

I've written about how we do egg hunts here before, and we did that again this year, but we added another game into the mix at the last minute. My friend Jennifer had got all the kids a chocolate Peter Rabbit each, so the plan was to have them "earn it". I wanted to sort out some kind of challenge that they could complete in their own time. I had seven kids doing this that were between six and nine years old and I only had the idea to do it the night before, so had to make the answer sheets and bunny clues rather hurredly.

I've drawn these little bunnies in this specific way since I was a kid, and I used to draw them exploding up into the air as if they were farting themselves off the ground like this...

That's how mature I am, and they made my mum giggle, so of course I kept doing it!

I decided to chunk up my "classic bunny" to give enough space to put the challenge clues on his tummy, and remove his signature propulsion system to make little rabbit markers that could be "hidden" around the garden for the kids to find and collect clues from.

The clues I came up with were to have each rabbit have a "clue letter" that you would have to write down next to the rabbit's number to spell out a password to get your chocolate bunny. To make it a bit tougher for the older kids, so that they couldn't just find a few rabbits and then guess the rest of the letters to complete the password, I also put a different famous rabbit on each marker that they had to make a note of next to that marker's number too.

Being extra fancy like we are around here, I used some little bulldog clips to attach the answer sheets to some hard backed kids books we had on the shelf and then used a bit of yarn to tie a pen to each, so that the kids would find it easier to go around gathering and writing the clues down.

The kids did a grand job on this challenge. Everyone completed it and got their chocolate bunny within about 20 minutes, which worked out really nicely. They had twelve bunny markers to find and the twelve "clue letters" when put together spelled out the prize password: "Hot Cross Buns".

If you wanted to make this easier then you could omit the extra step of having to name each rabbit found, or to make it harder you could have the code letters not be in order and they would have to figure out the password like an anagram puzzle at the end. Lots of ways of tailoring this to fit your crowd.

Leave it to Paul to hide eggs in a tree...

I've put a few printables here for you in case they turn out to be useful for someone next year. The first three are print outs of the markers I made for the hunt (they were cut out and taped to popsicle sticks to stick in the ground). I've removed the clues we used so that you can make your own hunt the way that you want it to be. Just click on the thumbnails to get the larger version to print.

Next is the answer sheet for the kids to fill in. The code letter boxes are coloured the same as the rabbits they go with so that the kids can more easily see which is which when reading across from the numbers. Two of these answer sheets fit on one US letter sized piece of paper.

Lastly, I threw together a page of smaller, plain, uncoloured, and unlabelled bunnies in case anyone wanted to use them as gift tags or use them to cut out and make into a card game somehow, like a matching game or something, or just let your kids colour them. Just thought that might be useful.

We had some seriously nice weather for this, which was lucky timing because it's due to start pouring down again tomorrow. Went on a wander with the family later in the day and found the world's best field of daisies for making head dresses with!

Also, I am happy to report that a couple of years later and they are still happily rocking the superhero ponchos I made them and blogged about way back here.

 

If you've got any of your plastic eggs left over then you might want to make some toadstools with them like these,

Or use them to make R2D2 secret storage boxes, or hang on to them because I have another craft that I want to post about that we did with them too.

Hope you all had a lovely weekend too and that this post might be useful for Easter time next year :)