This is an amazing car activity that has lots of opportunities for creativity and personalization. This activity can support learning across a variety of ages and throughout short or longer car rides. You can tailor the scavenger hunt to your child’s or your family’s interests, or for the kinds of things you think you might find on your planned route. This is what you do.

You choose things that you are going to look for while your drive. You can either draw pictures of the items or print them out from your computer. Then, depending on your preference, you can establish the structure for how you record the scavenger hunt in different ways. Here is one way the scavenger hunt can look:

Here you can see that on one side, there are pictures of things that you might see while you drive. Then, as you drive, when you see one, you can put a tally next to that picture. This teaches your child one-to-one correspondence. It will also expose them to tally marks (and counting by 5′s).

Another way for your child to interact with a scavenger hunt can look like this. You can use the same picture icons, but use containers instead. You can have a separate container to represent each item you are searching for.

     Here you record your findings differently. Each time you see one of the items, you can use an object (here a penny) to represent it. At the end of your trip, each container will have a certain number of objects. You can then count them and determine how many of each object you saw. This activity also reinforces math skills.

These are both great ways to structure scavenger hunts in the car. They will give you a lot to look for, talk about, and learn from! Let us know if you try it!!

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