Easter Egg Treasure Hunt

Easter is this coming Sunday, April 12th! Have you made your plans? Things will be different this year, won’t they? Lots of events have been canceled due to the Coronavirus pandemic but you can still have Easter fun even if you are stuck at home or stuck inside! Let me tell you what we did a couple years ago for Easter and maybe you can tweak it a bit to fit your situation. I was staying with our daughter and her hubby and kids while my hubby was gone on a business trip to China. It was cold and even snowing that week so I made up an Easter Egg Treasure Hunt for the kids. I started out with 96 plastic colored eggs and a 100 piece puzzle. I put the puzzle together, slid it carefully off the table onto a cookie sheet, put another cookie sheet on top of the puzzle so I could turn it over, then slid it back onto the table. I grabbed a pen and wrote the following rhyme on the back:

“Good job! You did it!

You stuck it out!

So now let’s see what

This hunt is about!

Could there be diamonds?

Or a brand new car?

Alas, no – we DO love you

But we can’t go THAT far!

So hidden close to where

I now reside

You’ll find the box

That holds your surprise!”

I then broke the puzzle up and put 1 piece of the puzzle in each plastic colored Easter egg. Four eggs needed to have 2 pieces inside in order to make the puzzle pieces fit in the number of eggs I had. I then hid the eggs around the inside of the house. When it came time to have the Easter egg hunt, the kids were off to find them in a hurry!

After they searched for eggs, they gathered together to count the eggs and make sure they had found all of them.

Once we made sure they had all the eggs, they took them to the dining room table and opened them and removed all the puzzle pieces. Then the whole family gathered around to work on putting the puzzle together.

When the puzzle was finished, they used the cookie sheet method again to turn the puzzle over so they could read the back and see what to do next. The part of the rhyme that says “So hidden close to where I now reside…” referred to the bedroom that I was staying in while I was visiting their family. The race was on once they deduced where the box with the surprise might be! They found it beside my bed. Inside the box was a new Tangle puzzle and a small Nerf gun for each kiddo, wrapped in tissue paper. They each got 6 “bullets”. In the bottom of the box was a piece of folded paper that read “Read this after opening gifts.” This message said…

“Oh, hey, wait! You’re not done yet!

There’s still another prize to get!

To reach your prize you must take out

Any bad guys hanging about.

But you must be careful with your aim

Because a wrong shot will end the game.

Teamwork is what you will need

To finish this task with all due speed.

3 minutes to shoot all the bad

But not 1 good guy can be had.

20 bad guys must go down

In order for you to reach the crown!”

There was a room set up with lots of small pieces of paper with stickers on them. 20 pieces of paper had dinosaurs on them which were the “bad guys”. And there were 20 pieces of paper that had puppy and kitty stickers on them which, of course, were the “good guys”. The pieces of paper were folded in half so they would stand up. The idea was for the kids to shoot and knock over all the dinosaurs within 3 minutes, but none of the puppies and kitties could be hit. If they knocked over a puppy or kitty, then they had to start all over with all the papers being set up again.

After the kids “shot” all the dinosaurs, they reached their prize – a new book for each one. I got too involved and forgot to take many pictures but here are some from after they finished their treasure hunt. This one is Grandma (me) trying to shoot a “bullet” through the Tangle puzzle hoop. Ha! (Grimacing always helps your aim…lol)