Listening walk scavenger hunt

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We all need to be better listeners. This twist on the traditional scavenger hunt will help your student hone listening observation skills while having fun finding the list on the printable page. Grab a clipboard and a crayon and go outside for a walk with this Listening Scavenger Hunt.

Items You Will Look for with the Listening Walk Scavenger Hunt

Go out and walk together. You can take this scavenger hunt with you as you walk through your neighborhood, downtown, or at a local park.

Your student will listen for these items:

Lawn Mower
Dog Barking
Traffic Noise
Bouncing Ball
Siren (fire truck, police car, or ambulance)
Talking
Laughing
Airplane Zooming
Phone Ringing
Wind Blowing
Music
Bird
Bee
Water

This scavenger hunt also includes bonus items to listen for:

Listen for anything that makes these sounds: clicking, whirring, banging, rattling, tapping, and squeaking.

As your student locates each item, have her color it on the printable page provided.

Benefits of the Listening Scavenger Hunt for Kids

This scavenger hunt is great as a go-along with your five senses theme. It provides many benefits for your student.

Scavenger hunts boost observation skills. As your child listens for objects, he will develop better observation skills.
Scavenger hunts require movements; this promotes gross motor development.
A scavenger hunt can provide safe sensory input for your student (this one is loaded with opportunities for hearing people and nature all around).
If you work on the scavenger hunt as a team, it will promote cooperation and social skills development.

Additionally, the bonus items will increase creative and critical thinking skills as your child has to determine what clicks, whirs, bangs, rattles, taps, and squeaks!

Picture Books About Listening

Encourage your student to become a better listener with the hunt and with these sweet stories.

The Listening Walk by Paul Showers
The Quiet Way Home by Bonnie Becker

You could also read some books about the five senses.

My Five Senses by Aliki
You Can’t Smell a Flower with Your Ear by Joanna Cole

Grab Your Free Printable Listening Walk Scavenger Hunt

Grab the scavenger hunt by subscribing to the newsletter. After you confirm, you will receive an email with a link to the hunt.

More Scavenger Hunts for Your Students

If you want to get out and walk while exploring the world around you, try some of our other scavenger hunts.

Backyard Scavenger Hunt
Christmas Scavenger Hunt
Forest Scavenger Hunt
Garden Scavenger Hunt
Grocery Store Scavenger Hunt
Indoor Scavenger Hunt
Nighttime Scavenger Hunt

ami2022-01-25T09:14:47-04:00

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The Listening Walk Outdoor Activity for Kids

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By Shaunna Evans 1 Comment · This content may contain affiliate links.

Scavenger hunts and nature walks are a fun way to reinforce so many different early learning skills and get kids up and moving. We loved using our sense of hearing on a listening walk. It’s great for a five senses science activity!

Exploring the Outdoors with a Listening Walk

We read both My Five Senses by Aliki and The Listening Walk written by Paul Showers and illustrated by Aliki for this month’s Virtual Book Club for Kids. We discussed how our senses work together to help us learn about the world around us. Then we made a list of the different things the child heard in The Listening Walk, and we decided to take a listening walk of our own.

I wanted the girls to have something easy to carry along, so we made a simple paper plate recording sheet. I originally thought of making a printable to use, but I really wanted to incorporate some writing and drawing practice into the activity. Instead the girls created their own recording sheets.

We started by drawing lines down the back of the paper plate to make triangular sections. We drew four lines to create eight sections.

Then each child chose one thing from our list of items from The Listening Walk and added a picture and label to one of the sections on the plate. We continued until all the spaces were full. Lovey (age 5) did her plate on her own. I helped Tinker (age 3) as needed with labeling.

To help us keep track of the items we found we cut each line on the plate just to the inner circle. This left little tabs that could be folded back as we heard an item on our checklists.

This is Lovey’s finished recording plate. If you look closely you can see where the cuts were made.

Then it was time to head out for our listening walk. Tinker was excited to hear some of the items on her plate even before we left the driveway.

She had almost half of the tabs folded back before we even started walking. I had to grin when she proudly announced, “That’s because I’m a good listener!”

We found almost all of the items the girls predicted that they would find. The only one we were missing was sprinklers, but Lovey reminded us that we have to get up earlier if we want to hear the sprinklers…smart girl!

Extending the Activity

Since we prepared this activity just before moving I thought it would be fun to save the recording plates and do the activity again in our new neighborhood. This gave us the chance to explore things that are the same and different about both places. Even if you aren’t moving, you could try this activity in two different locations and discuss the differences.

You might also try and come up with a list of different items you might hear in your neighborhood that weren’t mentioned in The Listening Walk. Then create a new recording plate and test it out.

Continue learning about the five senses with our printable lesson plan set. Each set includes over 30 playful learning activities related to the theme, and we’ve provide different versions for home preschool families and classroom teachers so all activities are geared directly toward your needs.

Get Your Copy

Preschool Classroom Five Senses Theme Lesson Plans also available on TpT.

Filed Under: Book Related Activities, Kindergarten, Outdoor Play, Preschool, Quick and Easy, Virtual Book Club for Kids Tagged With: five senses

SCAVENGER HUNTING IS A FAMILY GAME: montessoriblog — LiveJournal

Scavenger hunt was an American game that has been played by fans, young and old, for many years. The rules are simple: players are given a list of items that they must discover in a given space within a certain amount of time. The winner is the one who quickly finds the items on the list. A green fruit, a round object, something metallic - come up with any tasks you want and see how the children cope with them in different ways.

Step one - choose a location

Search operations can be carried out at home or outdoors: in the yard, in the nearest park or even throughout the city, for example, if you travel with your family by car or bicycles. If you are planning a home party for children, divide the participants into teams and set the game time for 15-20 minutes. And if you came up with a hunt just for your family, play for fun, take your time. To play you will need a pre-compiled list of items; a box in which you can put the finds; markers to mark found items in the list.

Step two - make a list of "finds"

The list of items for the game depends only on your imagination. Let the tasks be as simple as a ball, a newspaper, a rectangular thing, or intricate: can the participants find an object in the city park that can be sent for recycling? Ready-made templates with tasks can be found on the Internet (mostly in English), but it will be much more interesting to create them yourself.

Examples of finds for the home:

knitwear;

sweetness;

a book with more than 400 pages;

something useful in sports;

something smaller than a dice, etc.

For street hunting, these can be:

mailbox;

lamp;

a person who walks a dog;

that which can fly;

something to sit on, etc.

Step three - set the rules

Before starting the game, discuss the rules with the participants and make sure they understand them. Can the children scatter through the list, or do they have to check the items in order? Can team members work separately to save time, or should they always be together? How will the winner be determined: by calculating the points for the items found or by filling out the entire list?

Scavenger hunt can be played anywhere, even in the airport lounge. Write a list in a notebook and go in search of a passenger who travels with a pet; a pink suitcase and a man who reads a newspaper. During a road trip, invite your child to check the list of oncoming cars of all colors of the rainbow. On a walk, ask to find all the letters of the alphabet on street signs.

It is convenient to play scavenger hunt using mobile phones, especially if there are large items on the list that cannot be put into a box. Children love gadgets, and photos will be a clear proof of a successful search. And if they make a video, it can be viewed at the end of the game with some treats. A boring evening is guaranteed!

Author: Lena Charlin

Source: http://letidor.ru/article/okhota_na_musor_igra_dlya_vsey_134993/

Scavenger hunts

The American game Scavenger Hunt (“Junk Hunt”) is that the participants (it can be both teams and individual players) must find and collect items from a pre-compiled list within a certain time. Points are given for each item found. The one who collects the most of them wins. Or the one who finishes the whole list first. The game was invented by a certain Elsa Maxwell, and became very popular in the 30s of the last century at American parties. Now the most famous game of this genre is the Scavenger Hunt, held between students at the University of Chicago. Her at 1987 founded by Chris Straus. The game is held annually in May and lasts 4 days. During this time, students manage to collect about 300 items. Also, annual games are held in Washington; Northfield, Minnesota and Monroe, New York.

There are different versions of the game - in some you need to photograph all the items on the list, or somehow imagine them creatively. They play this game both in nature (in the forest, in the park, in the yard), and in an apartment or a supermarket. And now computer versions of “Junk Hunting” are also popular (the first version of online hunting was developed in 1992 by Rick Gates to encourage people to explore the resources available on the Internet).

This game is related to other "hunts" (for example, letter hunting - to collect letters of the alphabet, or graffiti hunting - to look for interesting graffiti) and is very similar to our favorite geocaching, only you need to look not for treasure, but just all sorts of interesting things:)

I I have long wanted to play Scavenger Hunt with the children for a walk. And when wonderfully designed search lists - “Forest Finds” - were posted on the kokokoKIDS website, I even became interested myself :). True, we did not go to the forest, but to the Botanical Garden at our university (Vorontsovsky Park or Salgirka Park).

In it we found everything, everything, everything that was planned! Here is the completed sheet:

Both 12-year-old Vita and 4-year-old Katya were very interested! Vitya was more interested in the competitive part - to collect the entire list faster and more fully, and Katya liked to mark everything. She walked around the park with a pen and a piece of paper and took our notes very responsibly :))). And Anton and I liked that the walk had a research goal 🙂

Children on the “hunt” 🙂

The easiest way was to find beautiful flowers - in the Botanical Garden in its "cultural" part there are several beautiful flower beds - a rose garden, an iridarium, a syringarium, an alpine hill. It was even difficult to choose what exactly from this beauty to put in the “find-snack”.

TNU Botanical Garden

Gladioli are twice as tall as Katya 🙂

And here, by the way, is the butterfly we need.

But I chose a simple field flower found by Anton. Among all this garden splendor, it turned out to be the most touching 🙂

We found a great many cones, acorns, anthills and hollow trees a little deeper into the park - further in it are areas of completely “wild” nature.

But there are problems with mushrooms. We are in our second month without rain. Therefore, the only fungus we found is a tree mushroom.

And on the wrought-iron bench near the entrance we saw more mushrooms - they will do instead of fly agaric from the list :)

There are also problems with hedgehogs. But we found something to replace it with - a prickly chestnut skin. She looks a lot like a hedgehog!

Traces of animals were searched for on “unknown paths”. We saw the imprint of a huge paw on the gravel. Katya thinks it's wolf :)

And I found another animal footprint... from a snail 🙂

Here are the snails themselves.

Forest birds are easy to find. Feeders are hung in a pine grove. There are ten of them in it. People actively feed the birds all year round. Therefore, titmouse there are quite tame. Vitya loves to feed them from the palm of his hand. Katya still does not have the patience to stand still. But this time the titmouse didn't take a picture, no matter how hard I tried to catch it in the lens. But a woodpecker suddenly flew to a distant pine. Handsome! And he hollowed a real hollow! Photo, unfortunately, only at high magnification.

Woodpecker next to a hollow

Feeders of all kinds - from a parrot cage, from a speaker box, just boxes. Do you see the titmouse?

Jay flew up

And under the walnut trees in the distance, squirrels frolic.