Letter & Number Scavenger Hunt

A learning scavenger hunt for preschoolers. Practice uppercase and lowercase alphabet recognition, along with counting while going on a hunt!

I posted briefly about this activity back during the 30 Days to Hands on Play Challenge. But since it was a challenge day, I didn’t want to get into the details of what the activity all involved.

The challenge day was to “Go on a Hunt”. And that’s what we did.

A letter and number scavenger hunt around the house.

But, I added more to it than that. Once the letters and numbers were found, Henry had the job of matching them to their corresponding counterpart. For letters, it was their lowercase match. For numbers, it was a dice looking square with the corresponding dots for that number.

My setup simply consisted of some white butcher paper in which I wrote the lowercase letters and drew the numbered dice. [I placed one of each number and letter on the paper to show Henry how to match them.]

I hid the foam letters and numbers around the house during nap. When Henry awoke, he was ready for his hunt to begin.

This was so fun watching him, first of all, go look for the letters, but to then come back to the paper and find where to put it. Some he knew quickly, and others he really had to concentrate and really figure it out.

The numbers proved to be the most difficult, making him work on one-to-one correspondence and his counting.

At that time, Henry could easily count to five consistently, but 5-10 were sometimes mixed up. Though he could do it. [Now, six months later, he's counting to 12 consistently! Amazing how fast the child's mind grows, isn't it?]

We love to do scavenger hunts around here, but I often struggle with finding fun new fresh ideas on what to ‘hunt’ for. And I love this learning version of the hunt. I hope to come up with some more learning scavenger hunts for different areas of learning.

Scavenger hunts are always great for days when we need to get moving. I often start them while I’m making supper, asking the kids to go find something. Whether it be something that’s a certain color, starts with a certain letter, a number of items, and so on. It usually will keep them busy while I’m trying to get something done.

We even do them while sitting in restaurants, looking around the restaurants for items that I rattle off. We may not go around physically to get the items, but we say what we find when looking around. It’s a great game to keep them busy while waiting for our food to arrive to the table.

What kind of scavenger hunt will you do today?

Henry is 3.5 years old.

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