Scavenging for My Favorite

One of my absolute favorite ways to have students review material before an assessment or practice skills once I've taught them a few ways to do so (a la solving quadratic equations or solving systems of linear equations) is to have them do a scavenger hunt around our school. Because we're a small program and the entire building isn't that large, I often put clues all over the school to encourage the kids to walk around and actually have to hunt for things, which adds an element of fun. During our most recent scavenger hunt practicing operations with polynomials one student commented that he had walked more during class than he does typically in a day. I reminded him that walking is good for you, put on my best Calvin's-dad face and voice, and pointed out that it builds character. 

From the great Calvin and Hobbes

Later that day when our program director notified students that defacing school property can get you in loads of trouble (aimed at a few kids doing art on the bathroom walls) my students were happy to suggest that the scavenger hunt pieces I'd taped all over the school technically fell under "defacing property." I assured them I would be happy to end future scavenger hunts and only do boring work in the classroom day after day and the mutiny was quickly squelched. 

A typical scavenger hunt will start with each student being given a problem to solve. Depending on the kind of skill we are practicing (and, realistically, how much prep time I've had with that particular hunt) once they've solved it, they either 

• Find a clue with the correct answer at the top and a new problem at the bottom of the card and continue this process
• Find a clue with the correct answer and pull a new problem from an envelope attached to the clue and continue to combine parts of previous answers to form future clue solutions
• Go to the coordinate location of their solution to find the next clue and continue that way (see below*)

I always make my scavenger hunt pieces with a unique sticker on each clue, and give students organizers to complete their work that calls for them to identify the sticker that was on each subsequent clue/problem card. I do that for four reasons:

1. I can very quickly check students' work when they've completed the activity. I can have each student start at a different clue so they're not tripping over each other, and since my scavenger hunts always end where they began I just check their circle of problem stickers against my key. Here's what a typical key looks like: 

   

   My stickers are animal, vehicle, and "teacher rewards" themed at the moment. 

2. I can easily differentiate for my different students. I can make sure that students start on a clue that proves to be an appropriate level of challenge for them and cycle from there, and for a student who is struggling I can set a number of clues that I would like them to get through in the allotted time period (i.e. "You'll have completed the task when you get to the Giraffe clue."
3. If a student gets partway through and can't find a matching solution, I can easily check that their clue progression has been correct or redirect them if they went awry somewhere along the way.
4. If we get interrupted during the scavenger hunt (fire drills, students having to leave early, etc.) or we run out of time they can finish the next day by simply finding the sticker they left off on and picking up from there. 

*If the skills we're practicing happen to relate to graphing on the coordinate plane I pull out the big guns (read: my floorplan of the school with a coordinate plane overlay) and their solutions take them to the exact location of the next clue instead of having to hunt around. This serves to both check their solving skills and help refresh their memory on how we work with coordinate points and how we read a map.