As much as I love Valentine’s Day I feel like it always sneaks up on me! Anybody else feel the same way?
Regardless of how prepared I am, I like to do a little something special for my family to celebrate the day and let them know I love them. This year I have a PERFECT Valentine’s Day Treasure Hunt for you! It will not disappoint!
I decided to make this treasure hunt have secret decodable clues. Your little hunters will have lots of fun turning their plain ‘ol white hearts into colorful hearts with a hidden message!
I wanted to find the best way to do this….would a white colored pencil be best? or a white crayon?
Here is my experiment:
It’s pretty easy to see the BEST and ONLY way to do this is to write your secret message with a WHITE CRAYON and then use a FRESH MARKER over the top. Trust me, when I say fresh, I mean fresh. I grabbed a marker out of my supplies and thought, “I just bought this at the beginning of the school year, it should work.”
NOT.
So remember, fresh is best!
I wanted to make this a little more personal for each kid. They usually have to share the clues of my treasure hunts, so this time I made three separate hunts specifically for each of them to do on their own.
The older the kid, the harder I hid the clue. I also made sure to make the clues fit with their reading capabilities. For example, on the last clue of their hunts they all found the prize under their pillows. So for my oldest child the last clue said, “Good-Night” and for my 6 year old it said, “Pillow” and for my 3 year old I drew a picture of their bed.
Here are some more clue ideas for you:
Clue ideas for older kids: Something Cold (fridge), Look up (curtain), Bye-Bye (car keys), Music (piano), A Game (any board game), Clean Me! (car).
Clue ideas for beginner readers: TV, Book, Cup, Wii, Sink, Cat/Dog, Bath.
Picture ideas for kids who can’t read: Shoe, Door, Spook & Fork, Toothbrush, Clock, Fish (a family pet).
If you don’t have a reader, let me tell you it worked AWESOME to draw pictures for them to follow. Just make sure they have some constant supervision with the marker part:)
I would suggest you pencil down the treasure hunt and number your hearts to help you be able to put it up. It is a little tricky to put the treasure hunt up when you can’t read the clue on it! So organize your hunt first and then print out my printable. Then you will need to cut out the hearts, write your clues in crayon and put them up around the house–making them as hidden as you want. I started by handing my kids their specific heart and a marker. From there they were off!
I can’t even tell you how much my kids enjoyed this. They LOVED decoding their special messages–and it really is that easy for them to do it.
Do you remember as a kid drooling over those big Hershey kisses you see in the store? I certainly did. So when I saw them with the Valentine candy I knew that would be the perfect end to this treasure hunt. Seriously look at that face?! Yes, totally worth it!
Another prize idea you could use is to leave a candy message for them. Go here to this post for the idea and printable!
Now it’s time to save my printable to your computer and pin it on Pinterest!
It won’t be long before Valentine’s Day is here AND you can feel confident you already know what to do!
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