Digital Scavenger Hunt

As part of this weeks lessons we did scavenger hunts!  When I heard that we were doing scavenger hunts I was really excited because I love scavenger hunts!  We split up into teams by content area to complete our hunts.  My team had four different Elementary options for the scavenger hunt project. We chose the ABC project.  With this we went out onto campus and searched for things that began with the letters of the alphabet.  We then photographed one object for each letter.

When first looking at the projects I thought that this would be a relatively simple scavenger hunt, but I was a little surprised at how hard it was to come up with objects for some of the letters.  B, for example, was really easy.  We instantly thought of bricks, bicycles, and a few other things that started with B.  Other letters such as I and K took a little more creativity.  After dwelling on what we were going to do for these letters we realized that two really good options were already in our pockets: the iPhone and Keys! All in all it was a really fun project and was a nice change from setting in the classroom and working on the computes the whole time.

To continue our scavenger hunt project we are now going to take our images that we collected and edit them, and then put them into a Picasa Web Album and into a Google Presentation.  Using a presentation we could help children learn and polish their ABC's and letter sounds by showing them things that begin with those letters.  Collecting images and making a presentation could be helpful for teaching many different things to children of all ages across all of the subject areas.

Using similar techniques we could use scavenger hunts with our future students.  While younger children would have a hard time splitting up into groups and doing one, a teacher could take the whole classroom on a tour through their city with a scavenger hunt in mind.  When I was in the 3rd grade my teacher took us out on a walking tour of our city and made a local field trip out of the day.  She gave us questions to answer and things to look for as we did our tour.  I remember really enjoying this because I learned things that I never knew about the place I lived.  I remember taking a disposable camera with me and taking pictures of things that I thought were interesting.  I believe that I could do something similar with my future class.