Treasure Hunts

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Yvonne, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. I'm just one of thousands of volunteers up and down the country who all want to make a difference to their schools. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in UK schools to boost budget. And I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. Whenever we go anywhere as a family, if we're going for a day out and they offer us a quiz or a treasure hunt to do, I always put my hand up and take it, sometimes to the embarrassment of my children, but I still love finding things and following trails and all that sort of thing. I have written loads of treasure hunts as fundraisers and just as fun activities for my own family, and I I love making them just as much as I love to take part in them. I would say treasure hunt is where you follow clues to find some treasure or a prize at the end, whereas sometimes they can be called scavenger hunts. But I would say a scavenger hunt is where you collect items as you go along and bring them back to them potentially exchange for a prize, maybe. If you haven't ever tried a treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt as part of your PTA fundraising, I am firstly going to explain the many good and varied reasons why they make a great addition to your fundraising or event calendar, and hopefully encourage you to give it a try this year. And then I'm going to share some of my ideas with you, um, things that I have tried and that have worked for me uh really well in the past. So let's get stuck in. So just to let you know, I will probably mainly be using the phrase treasure hunt to describe this activity, but um, of course, anything that I say about a treasure hunt can also apply to a scavenger hunt. So just to let you know. So, firstly, they are very versatile activities, meaning you can fit them into other fundraisers or have them as a standalone fundraising event just on their own. So they can they are very flexible. Um, you can make them as long or as short as you need to, depending on what your event is, and they can fit into many different environments, and they're also suitable for the inside or the outside, so they're suitable for grassy areas, woodland areas, hard concrete areas, lots of different places can host a treasure hunt. And uh, because they're so flexible, you can make them age appropriate, so you can make them for very small children. So, preschoolers, I've done treasure hunts for preschoolers before, for school-age children, for my teenagers, and you can also make them just for children, or you can make them for families as well by putting slightly harder things in that maybe the grown-ups need to help with, or they need to work as a team, and you could, in fact, talking of teams, you could encourage people to form a team to take part in a treasure hunt as well if you wanted to. And of course, you know me, I love a theme. A treasure hunt can easily be made to fit a theme, any theme you like. So if you are fundraising for a specific item or a specific subject area, you can make your treasure hunt fit into that theme theme. You just need to unleash your creativity when thinking about the route, thinking about where you're gonna hold it, and thinking about the clues or the things that people have to find as they go along, and also thinking about theming the prize at the end. So lots of potential there to fit your treasure hunt into whichever theme you are working on. And in most cases, you need hardly any volunteers to run a treasure hunt. Most of the work for a treasure hunt is done in advance on working out the route and the clues, um, sourcing the prizes, and of course, the advertising, which forms a big part of all of the fundraising that PTAs do. And then to run it, you just need to basically be able to give things out. So you give out your treasure hunt maps, um, you put out the clues, and then you have to just be there to give out the prizes. So it can be very simple, and it's a great example of an easy, low-cost and low-effort fundraiser that you can add into your PTA calendar. Another reason why I love treasure hunts is that they combine exercise with puzzles and clues. So if you already do something maybe like a sponsored walk and you want to shake it up a bit or refresh it a bit, then maybe turning it into a treasure hunt is you know a walk with some extra fun in it. But anything I think that gets the kids moving around most you know, outside if that's what you need for your treasure hunt, and gets them to think a bit as they go along, is just loads and loads of fun. And you could even add an element of competition into your treasure hunt, for example, which team can complete it in the fastest time. Um, I haven't personally tried that approach, but it is an option for you if you wanted to maybe do it for older children and get them to run around or something, but yeah, you can add a competition element, which you know, competition element does appeal to quite a lot of people to take part. Um, and finally, you can use a treasure hunt to showcase something about your school to your parents and the children. So, for example, if you have recently made changes to your outside space, you could make a treasure hunt which takes families around the new space to highlight it or have it um or or have your treasure hunt as an event to officially open the outside space. Um, so you can really use the treasure hunt to highlight things to people and make them walk through the thing that you have just funded because that's the route of the treasure hunt, so they can actually see what has happened, what changes have been made at the school because of uh PTA funding. So, as you can see, a treasure hunt is a fantastic, versatile, flexible activity that can be used as a fundraiser on its own or as part of a wider event. So I hope that that list of reasons why you should try Treasure Hunt has whetted your appetite to have a go at one if you haven't done one before. I'm now going to share some of my own experiences with organising treasure hunts, um, really to give you an idea of how different you can make them, uh, share some ideas that I have had, um, but also I haven't had a chance to try yet. So I have got lots of ideas for treasure hunts, but I haven't managed to get them going. Um, so I'm hoping that you can maybe use uh some of my ideas to inspire you. And this is not an exhaustive list of ideas, there's always something else, something new you can try that might work for your school. So I'm just gonna take you through some treasure hunts. I think it's about four different treasure hunts that I've organised that are all slightly different, just so that you can see how I've used treasure hunts as part of uh a fundraising um event or as a standalone event. So just before we get into examples of treasure hunts I have actually run, I thought I would quickly run down how you can use them as a fundraiser because that's what we really want to talk about is incorporating them into your diary of events for the year. As far as I can see, there are two ways you can use a treasure hunt as a fundraiser. You can have the treasure hunt as a standalone event where you would encourage people to pay for a treasure map or the scavenger sheet or something and win a prize for completing it, or you can have the treasure hunt as part of another fundraising event where you would still charge for the treasure hunt sheet, possibly, or you may have included that in the price of your other fundraising event. Now I would say that if the treasure hunt is part of a fundraising event, you'll probably be charging a lower amount for people to take part, and the treasure hunt itself might be shorter. If your treasure hunt is a standalone event, so the event is the treasure hunt, then you're probably wanting to charge more for people taking part um for the treasure hunt. And therefore, you would have to make it longer or more involved or something. If you're charging, say you're charging five pounds for somebody to take part in the treasure hunt and you uh want to give them a prize for completing it, then you're going to have to make it worth their while. Because remember in the PTA, with PTA fundraising, you are always trying to get people to exchange money for a worthwhile activity that they can take part in. You need people to feel that whatever they're doing is worth them exchanging money to do it. So it's important to have that at the back of your mind. So I would suggest that you base the cost of taking part in the treasure hunt on how long it will take people to complete the treasure hunt. So more clues, more time completing the treasure hunt should be a higher cost, I think, because you're providing them with a a more fulfilling experience, let's say that. But with a higher cost to take part, you might feel you need a more expensive prize at the end. So uh you do need to spend a little bit of time, probably consulting with your team, have a like a team discussion about it, and have a think about how your treasure hunt's going to be received, who's going to be taking part, where it is, what they're going to be doing, and try and cost uh cost it and price it accordingly and think about your prizes. With the prizes as well, you can do individual prizes. So I am going to mention a treasure hunt. I organised it to school fate where the children took part and each child would win some chocolate coins, so that's an individual prize. If you're running your treasure hunt as a team activity, then you can do with a prize for the team, um, which could be something they could share ideally, like a box of chocolates or something else that you can think of. Sometimes it is hard thinking of prizes for teams. Um, another idea is that, and you can do this for any treasure hunt, but another idea to incentivize people to take part is to gather all the completed treasure uh answer sheets at the end, and they could all be entered into a prize drawer with a bigger prize, one bigger prize to win at the end from everybody taking part. So you could give out small prizes when you've actually completed it, but the chance to win one big prize. Um, so again, that's just a different way of costing uh or pricing up the prizes if you don't want all of your profits to be absorbed into the cost of the prizes, which can happen sometimes, it can be tricky. So I just wanted to highlight how you could use a treasure hunt as a fundraiser. There are, in fact, two ways you can use a treasure hunt as a fundraiser. The first is that you sell your treasure map, stroke treasure clues to the people so they can take part in the treasure hunt. The second way is that you get whoever's taking part in the treasure hunt to be sponsored to take part in the treasure hunt. And when I uh go on in a moment to talk about the different treasure hunts I have organised, um, I will explain those which were fundraisers exactly how we did it. And we have done a sponsored one and we have done just selling the treasure maps. So we've done two different ways, and um, whichever way you pick just depends really on what your treasure hunt actually is, whether it's a standalone event or part of another event. I mean, I'm sure you will pick the appropriate method, but there are two different ways that you can do it. So I just wanted to highlight that in case you hadn't done it before. So the first treasure hunt I organised was part of our PTA Summer Fate. This was actually I think my first year being on the PTA, so I wasn't chair at this point, I was a general member, and I volunteered to run a treasure hunt. We had loads of stalls at Summer Fate across the playground in the summer, and I volunteered to have a stall to sell a treasure hunt. So I decided to go with the classic theming, which was pirate themed, and I drew a map of the school grounds, and I basically relabeled everything so that it had a pirate-themed name. So, for example, we do have a pond on our school grounds which I renamed the swamp, um, which actually is quite accurate because it's quite overgrown, so it does look a bit more swamp-like than pond-like, but I did that for lots of kind of landmarks on the school ground so the children could navigate their way around, they didn't get lost. Um, so I drew my map, I then printed the map onto a piece of kind of creamy yellow A4 paper. I bought a stack of A4 paper in the right colour because I like attention to detail on things like this. Uh, so I printed it on one side, and on the other side, I had printed the clues and the spaces to write the answer. So when a child came over to get the treasure hunt, I just gave them one piece of paper and it was all contained on one piece of paper. So for my clues, I um identified five areas on my map that the children had to visit and find the answers to my questions. The answers would then point to a different stall at the Fate where they would find their treasure once they had collected all the clues. So I made a stall where I sold the treasure maps and I sold them for one pound each, and I decided to make my stall or my table, because I just had a table, uh, look more interesting than just a pile of maps by making a little kind of mini desert island scene on it. So I had a tray I have used for gardening at home to kind of you know make pots up in. I had a tray, I put some sand for my sandpit in it, and I used my children's Playmobil and other, you know, plastic toys that we had at home to kind of make it look like a desert island, um, to entice the children to come and look and see what was on my store because it wasn't very obvious that my store was a treasure hunt map store. Um, and I think I also wore a pirate hat as well, just to kind of go fit with a theme. So, about the theme. Um, so my prizes I decided were gonna be the classic chocolate coins for prizes wrapped in gold foil, which I discovered were actually quite an expensive prize to give. And you can't just give one chocolate coin to a winner, you need to give them a decent amount of chocolate coins. So, um, for my first fundraising stall at a fate, I probably spent too much on the prizes, just to give you a heads up there. Um, especially when you're only charging a pound for somebody to take part, but I really wanted to stick with the theme, and I felt that nothing else would do to get gold-covered chocolate coins, so that's what I went for. Um, so for the children to find the answers to my clue questions, I kept this really simple. I found some free clip art pictures online, I printed them out on A4 pieces of paper, uh, cut them out, and I laminated them so I could put them in my different locations, so even if it rained, they would be protected. Um, so for example, one of my questions was how many green parrots are in the tree in the wild area? Um, and the all in fact, all the answers the children found were either numbers, just a number, or they were maths symbols like add or subtract or multiply or divide or equals. So the answers, as you collected the answers to my clues in the various locations, you would either get a number or a symbol, and on the answer sheet, it made a sum that you had to solve to get the final um number um and a letter, which then gave you a grid reference on my map so you could find the stall that had the treasure to help them in case that went a bit wrong, because um it was some people didn't actually really understand what they had to do. I'm not sure if that was me overcomplicating it or if they just didn't get it, but anyway, um on the store where the treasure was, I also put a giant X sign um on like a treasure map paper so that it X marks the spot, of course, and so that if they couldn't get the grid reference right, they could also look for the X on the stores. Um so that was my treasure hunt, and I'm gonna see if I can find uh a copy of it because I don't think I have a copy on my computer because this was back in 2017, so I'm gonna see if I can find a copy of it and put a picture of it on my website so that you know what I'm talking about from that description. Um so, like I said before, all the hard work was in the preparation before the event. So at the event, all I had to do was man stall, sell the maps, um, put out the clues obviously in the in the setup of the fate, but actually on the in the two hours that the fate ran, I didn't really have very much to do. Um packing away was really easy, and because I laminated the pictures, I was actually able to take them all in, um, and I was able to use them all another time for a similar treasure hunt, maybe even the next year, I can't quite remember, but I know I did use them all again. So using them again meant even less preparation the next time. Um I could use the maps as well because I um as usual, as I have mentioned before on this podcast, I assume that everybody is going to have a go um and come to all of my events because they're really good. And uh so I did overprint the treasure maps and I also overbought on chocolate coins, but luckily we had another event we could use the chocolate coins at, so um that worked out okay. But um, yes, I was uh a bit over enthusiastic when it came to how many mups and how many chocolate coins I um I did. Uh one of the things which I did notice about my treasure hunt and having it at an event like a summer fate is that the children went off to do the treasure hunt and um it took them a while to do it, and therefore they weren't playing the other games at the Fate whilst they were doing the treasure hunt, and that's why I charged a pound rather than 50p to do the treasure hunt because I thought, well, they're not going to be spending money on other things whilst they're doing this treasure hunt. Um, so that's just something to bear in mind. If you're having a treasure hunt as part of another event, treasure hunts take a little bit longer than just like playing Tin Can Alley or whatever. So you just need to be aware that whilst they're doing the treasure hunt, they're not doing other things, and maybe charge uh accordingly for that if you like, or just have it in the back of your mind. Um, so that's a possibly a bit of a downside to having a treasure hunt at an event, but to the flip side, the upside of having a treasure hunt at an event is that it takes a long time to do. So if you're wanting families to hang around at an event um for a bit longer until right to the end, because you've got something special at the end, for example, then have a treasure hunt available that families can do together. And kill a bit of time taking part in that. So you just really need if you have a treasure hunt at an event, you just really need to consider if it's going to be a problem that people are taking a long time to do it, or if it's something that you want people to do. So that was just an observation that I made following that event, basically. Right, another example of a treasure hunt which needs even less preparation than the one I just mentioned is one that I recently prepared for my son's birthday. So my younger son just turned 11 and he wanted to have a sleepover for his birthday. Um, and I wanted to make sure him and his friends had got a bit of fresh air and burned off some energy before descending on my house at tea time. Um, so I planned a treasure hunt uh around our village for him and his friends. So this time I didn't have to put out any clues. Um, I didn't want to put out any clues just in case a random member of the public removed my clues or moved it or something, or the wind blew away or something, so I couldn't put any clues out. So instead I used landmarks already in the village. So what I did was I went for a walk with a notepad and I plotted the route for the longest walk around the village. Now my village is not very big, but we do have some footpaths that do go off a little bit, so you can kind of make a round route and make it longer if you use all the footpaths. And I looked around for markers in the village that I could use in the treasure hunt. So, for example, I noted down obvious lamppost numbers, I counted um like decorations in people's gardens, I looked at menus at the pub and opening times at the village shop, or collection times on the post box, or um the numbers of trees in a particular area, the numbers on some parking spaces. Um I basically looked for information in the village that was not going to change and was not going to be removed or moved in any way. And then I just created some questions to answer, and all the answers, again, were numbers, which is I think quite good to put at the start of your treasure hunt in your little intro bit just to say all the answers are numbers, um, and then it does help people if they don't understand the question or they're just a bit confused. If they know it's going to be a number, that does help. Um so once uh so they set off with the sheet, they didn't have a map because my my village is not that complicated, uh, but I did put a couple of directions on it before they left so that my son knew exactly where to go. Um, and they took the sheet and a pencil and they went round and collected all the answers. Um, they got all the numbers, and when they got back, I got them to add up all the numbers. So they had a big number, over a thousand, I think it was, and then they add then I asked them to add up the din individual digits of that number and to keep adding them together until they got just one single digit number left at the end, and that was the answer uh to win their prize, and their prize was um a bundle of more snacks and sweets and treats to eat while they watched their sleepover film later that night. Um, and that took them probably about an hour to do, so I was really pleased that they were outside um playing, running around, finding clues for an hour. I think they stopped off at the park, um, had a bit of a play and then carried on again. So um, so it worked brilliantly from my point of view, and it also gave my son a chance to show his friends around the village because some of them hadn't been here before, so it was quite nice for them to see the village where he lives. Um, so the only preparation I had to do for that was a short walk, which I enjoyed, and uh write some questions. I could even share this treasure hunt with my friends in the village, as none of the answers are going to change, so it's quite a safe treasure hunt to do. Um this is a perfect idea to use to reach out into your local community. You can involve the local community by encouraging them to take part in your treasure hunt, or it's a great way for your school community to get to know their local area a bit better. So, this um probably this approach obviously would probably be a um a standalone treasure hunt. Um, you could get local people to buy a map um and families from your school. Um, so uh the potential of doing it this way, I think you can reach quite a lot of people. As I mentioned before, it's also possible to develop a treasure hunt for an indoor space. The two examples I've given you so far are for outdoors, and outdoors obviously there's much more space, but you can develop it for an indoor space as well. And as you know, if you have listened to episode 25 of my podcast, as a PTA, we fundraised for a new library at our school a couple of years ago. Um, it's World Book Day soon. In fact, this week is World Book Day, and I am now volunteering in the library regularly with a small group of children just to help to keep the library tidy and to help the children encourage their friends to borrow books and talk about books as well. And uh for World Book Day, myself and the librarians have tried to develop, well, we tried we started off with the idea of developing an escape room that children could come into the library and do as an activity on World Book Day, but in essence, it's more like a little treasure hunt around the library with a kind of puzzle to solve at the end. Um so the idea is that the children have to visit different sections of the library to find clues to discover which book has been stolen out of the library. Now, our school library is only the size of a classroom, it is not big, there is not a lot of space in it for walking around, but obviously there are different sections in different areas, and we wanted to try and um encourage the children to learn their way around the library a little bit, make sure they knew where various sections were. Um so that was the idea behind it, and also to spend time in the library on World Book Day. So um we also had to make this one quite short to ensure we could accommodate as many groups as possible during the day because we don't we didn't want really massive groups in the library because there's not enough space, but also the uh the school has other activities planned on World Book Day, and we didn't want um the children to miss out on those things. Uh so but this is an example of how you could run a treasure hunt inside and how it doesn't need to be very long. So in our library escape room/slash treasure hunt, we've only got four clues. There's only four clues. We're estimating and hoping it's only going to take one group no longer than 15 minutes to actually complete it. Um, and this is a proper treasure hunt, so it does lead one clue, leads to another clue, leads to another clue. So they do have to have a look around a little bit. And um again, this is an example of how you can showcase a new asset that your PTA has funded to your children and potentially their families by holding a treasure hunt within the area that you want them to come and look at. So uh I'm gonna feed back to you about how that escape room slash treasure hunt is gonna actually turn out. We're yeah, hoping they're gonna only take 15 minutes. I'm not sure what we're gonna do if they take longer, but anyway, we shall see. It's a new thing that we're trying, and um the children have had some brilliant ideas on how to um on how to run it, so I'll let you know how that goes. And I have also done a treasure hunt for very little children. Um, for example, uh a birthday party when my two children were two and four years old. So we did a traditional sort of village hall party where you do lots of games like Pass the parcel and musical statues and that kind of thing. And as part of that um birthday party, I decided to do a treasure hunt again because it takes up time. You need to fill those two hours of your village hall party. So I bought a couple of magazines. I bought one magazine about cooking and one magazine about farming or farm machinery because my two-year-old absolutely loved cooking and food, and my four-year-old absolutely loved tractors and machinery. And I cut out pictures from those magazines, glued them onto some thick cardboard, and then just cut the pictures down the middle. Um, I I hid um one half of all of the pictures around the hall, and I when I say hid, I just put them on the floor. I mean, there was you know, in a village hall there's no sort of hiding spaces because it's just kept clear for events, isn't it? And also these children are very small, so hiding them would have been quite difficult for them to find. And then I gave uh children the other half of the jigsaw, because it's kind of like a jigsaw to find. Um so they had half of the picture and they had to go and find the other half of the picture they had. And uh we just put some music on, and I think we gave them one to start with, because I had quite a lot of children, quite a lot of pictures, so they each had one, and once they'd found one and brought it back, I gave them a different picture um until basically all the pictures had been found, and that was the game, and it was really cute watching them all try and sort of match their pictures. Um, and that is an example of a very simple treasure hunt in a confined indoor space, um, but for little children. So, little children who would perhaps struggle with clues, you can go for pictures um instead, and just finding pairs. It was basically about finding pairs, wasn't it? And um that you know you could do shapes or colours or something really simple for them. So that's just an example for slightly younger children. A treasure hunt, remember, can be for any age group at all, they're so great. So that was four examples of treasure hunts which I have tried before myself. We did also run a scavenger hunt as a PTA fundraiser when we were raising funds to build a forest school area on our school grounds. Now I do want to talk more about this in another episode, but um, essentially, we did manage to link our fundraising activities for this particular topic to nature one way or another, and this scavenger hunt that I'm going to explain now that was one of them. So, this idea actually came from our the teacher who is their forest school lead, and we called it the Nature in a Box Challenge, and we ran it as a sponsored challenge. So the children were sponsored via just giving, which we were using at the time, um, to take part in the challenge over one February half term. So, and again, this is a very easy fundraiser but combines exercise, which is great, and the fresh air. Uh, so what we did was we bought some small plain match boxes from a craft shop, um, and we gave one to each child along with um uh like a letter with the instructions on they took it home over half term. So the instructions were they had to fit as many different items from nature into the matchbox as they could, and also decorate their matchbox because the matchboxes we bought were completely plain cardboard, so just perfect for adding colours and sticking stuff on. Um, and then there was going to be a winner for the most items collected, and another winner for the best decorated matchbox, and um so there'd be two winners from each class, and again, no it not even any outlay with the prizes because the prizes we um decided on four prizes that they could pick from. So, one was you can earn you can win 15 minutes extra playtime, you can win some golden time. So, at our school, golden time is where it's kind of free play in the classroom, and they bring out toys that maybe you just get when it's wet play that you don't have all the time. Um, you can win sitting on chairs for assembly, don't you just love these prices? Um, or you or the reception class could win bringing in a Teddy for an afternoon to be with you in the classroom. Um, so we had lots of entries. I think over 50% of our school entered, and we raised over £500 of sponsorship money, which was um uh a really great amount considering that we hardly did any work for this fundraiser. So raising £500 was really great. Um, and obviously we ran it over a school holiday, but you could run a scavenger hunt on maybe a timed basis if you need a shorter one or one within another event, or just um have a cut-off time or something like that. Um, so yeah, we had a really great response to this fundraiser. It was a lot of fun, and the children collected some really cool things from nature. And when I took my son out on a walk to do his, it was really nice actually paying attention to what we were looking at, where we were, whether it was small enough to fit in the matchbox. It was it was actually quite um it was like a more involved and sort of deeper challenge than it looked on the surface, and uh, and it was a lot of fun to actually do it. Um, another way to do a scavenger hunt is to have a list of things that people need to find or bring back with them. And I remember doing one myself at primary school when I was in the infants. Um, our teacher gave us a cardboard um painting paint palette. You know the ones that artists hold with all their paint on, and they dab their paintbrush on and then they paint from it. So it was one of those, but it was made of cardboard, and the teacher had put double-sided sticky tape on it. Um, and we had to go into the school grounds and find items from nature that we would stick onto our paint palette, and it had to be all different colours. So we would make a paint palette made up of natural items, um, so different coloured leaves and flowers, twigs, feathers, whatever, seeds, whatever you could find, and you had to stick them on your paint palette. And I remember as a child just having the best time trying to find all of those different things. It was so much fun. Anyway, those are some examples of things I have tried or I've organized in real life. I do also have some ideas of a treasure hunt that I haven't got around to trying yet, and I just wanted to share those with you in case it might work for your school or your setting or your um uh fundraising planning at the moment. So actually, this one that I'm gonna talk about now, I'm hoping to try this summer at my school. But anyway, this one is uh where you take close-up photos, um, print them out on a piece of paper, and the children have to identify what the items are from the very close-up photographs. So uh you um basically go to the place where you want to do your treasure hunt. So, say it is in the school grounds, uh, you go with your camera or your phone, get permission from the school, and uh you just take photos of things. So I've already started to accumulate pictures for this. Um so I went into my school grounds, we have a an outside ping pong table there. So I went up to the ping pong table and I took a very close-up photo of the net that goes across the middle, which is actually made up of hexagon shapes. So I took a photo of the hexagon shapes, and that's all that's in the photograph. You can't identify that it's the ping pong table because there's hardly anything else in there. Um, so it's things like that. And I went over to we have a bin in the on the school ground that's in shape like a dolphin, so I took a close-up photo of the dolphin's eye. Um, and so it's it's things like that that you're going to be looking at things in a different way and really zooming into the detail. And um, like specifically, it might help the children look for shapes in everyday objects, that kind of thing, shapes, lines, um, colours, that kind of thing. Um, and again, like if you were to do it in a school library, you could do shelves, you could do labels, you could do colours, posters, um, maybe partial titles of books or front covers or chairs or you know, any hand door handles, door signs. Oh, the list is endless. Um, so there's not very much preparation needed. Somebody just needs to go and take some photos, decide how many you want to put on the sheet, um, and it's something a bit different as well to um always having a question or a clue or a puzzle to solve. It's still a puzzle, but it's more of a visual puzzle. So it's great for perhaps people who aren't um great at reading, or if you just wanted to offer something different. Okay, another idea for your treasure hunt is to tell a story with your treasure hunt. So rather than lots of random questions, can you create a story that the children follow along whilst also collecting some answers? Um, again, if you wanted to link this kind of thing to a book that your um school or your class is following, or um, you know, link it to, I don't know, your values for that term, or I mean anything, it could just be anything, you know, that's a perfect one for World Book Day, for example. If you have a fundraiser on another specific named national day, then you can uh link it to that. So that's really uh that's a really good idea for um creating a theme. Uh number three is sometimes you don't uh need clues at all, and you can just ask people to look for answers within a specific area. So, for example, you could hide letters, like you could um print out giant letters, one letter per A4 sheet of paper and put those in windows of houses down your village street. You can ask people if they would display one in their house, and then you can say, right, you have to go down this street, collect all the letters that you can find, and then maybe they might make a word or something like that. Or you could identify pictures that people have put in their houses, um, or you can hide them around the school grounds. You can say, right, you have to go out, you have to find 10 pit there'll be 10 pictures of um characters from CBB's um TV programmes, and you have to collect them all and write down their names. Um, so uh yeah, you don't even have to write any clues for that, you just have to get some pictures or some letters or something. Um, the only thing with this one uh that you need to be careful of is you need to be sure you are specific about the area in which they are looking for the answers, so they don't wander off uh in an into an unsafe place or they don't spend their time looking for something that just isn't there because they're gonna be demoralised and annoyed by that. So just have to be very specific where your um area is and also how many clues there are to find because you know if you're doing the letter one, you want to make sure people do actually achieve all of the letters to make to make a word. And very finally, my final idea if you wanted to make a treasure hunt is instead of clues printed out, you could actually have people dressed up becoming a character uh as part of the theme for the treasure hunt, so that the children might get the map, they have to go to a particular location, and at the location there is a volunteer dressed up, taking on the role of a character, and they have to ask the character questions to get answers or get the clue to go to the next location. And I just think that would be a really amazing way of running a treasure hunt that was very, very different. Maybe your characters could even have to give out particular things that the children have to collect as they go around, but it would I think make it an incredibly memorable treasure hunt to have characters, real people there, um, talking that you can ask questions to, and it would be funny and unexpected. I think that would work particularly well, for example, if you were basing your treasure hunt on a theme or a book or a story that they follow around. I mean, really, the options for treasure hunts are endless, and you just need to use your imagination and your creativity, and you could come up with something that is really different and uh a real experience. Obviously, if you're asking for volunteers to be based in certain locations, you'll need lots more volunteers. Um, a traditional treasure hunt is nice and light on the volunteers, which is what makes them so attractive sometimes. But yeah, imagine if you had people dressed up and the children could follow a story round on their treasure hunt, that would be so much fun. In fact, I would just as a child I'd love to take part in that, and as an adult, I would love to write that treasure hunt. So um, yeah, if you oh gosh, if you organise that, please, please do tell me how that worked. I would love to hear about it. So, as we have heard, there are so many ways you can use treasure hunts or scavenger hunts as part of your fundraising, but also they could be a great way to bring your school community together. So, for example, you could organise a whole school picnic with some free activities, and one could be a treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt as they cost nothing to set up, um, apart from a prize. I think it's important to give a prize at the end. So, do let me know if you have organised a successful treasure hunt or a scavenger hunt as a fundraiser or just as a fun activity. Let me know by email, it's hello at ptapodcast.com. I'd love to hear how you ran yours, if you fitted it to a theme, what did you have as the prizes, um, and if you had any other ideas in addition to the ones that I've already mentioned, then um yeah, do share them and I'd be able to share them with other listeners on the podcast as well. So, as always, I wish you lots of luck with whatever your PTA is working on at the moment, and I will chat to you next time. Bye for now.