Scavenger Hunt at Family Reunion

Today is the day of our big McGinnis Family Reunion. I always create a Scavenger Hunt for these gettogethers and this year is no exception. Because we live on a large property the hunt covers a fair bit of ground and usually takes from 30 to 60 minutes.

Because our reunion also includes my husband's family, and friends, I like to encourage mingling by creating random partners for the hunt. I do this by creating cards in pairs - either numbers or animals or colours. Sometimes I have people choose their cards as soon as they arrive. This gives them lots of time during the first hour of the party to look for their match. But other times I wait until the Scavenger Hunt is ready to start and then everyone picks their card and frantically hunts for their match. That's lots of fun as it gets quite noisy with people yelling out numbers, or animal names, or sometimes making the sound of their animal.

I like to have family gather some items but I also have them answer questions for part of the hunt. This year I tried to think of some genealogy questions that could be incorporated but decided instead to create a separate game called Family Trivia Game which I talked about in yesterday's blog post.

This year we are using pairs of animals and it should be fun to see everyone trying to find their matching animal.

So our Scavenger Hunt consists of gathering items such as:

* a piece of hay

* an oak leaf

* an egg (we have chickens but they don't lay enough eggs. So to make sure everyone finds an egg, I hardboiled 2 dozen which we will hide in the barn and around the yard. However the teams will not be told that the eggs are hardboiled. Instead each team wil be told that they need to be very careful with their eggs since they are freshly laid by the chickens and can't come back to me broken.... just a little McGinnis twist!)

* a Canadian flag (I'm going to plant small ones on sticks around the yard)

* an apple (we have apple trees scattered around the property)

I also ask questions such as

* How many outside doors are on our house
* How many barns do we have
* What is the name of hubby's tractor?

For a bit of extra fun this year, I took envelopes and addressed them to each animal team. I then created stamps using the animal picture from the cards I made, and on each stamp I printed a postage amount (2c, 5c, etc) The instructions and question posed on the Scavenger Hunt say that it is Mail Call. Each team has to get their team mail (it's up to the teams to figure out there is a rural mail box at the end of our driveway) and bring it back. They must also note the cost of their stamp. But the trick is that I fastened the stamps on very loosely, and it is almost guaranteed that many will fall off before the team checks the postage. Yes okay I have a bizarre sense of humour....

For an extra surprise I sealed all the envelopes and in each one I put a slip announcing that team had won a bonus prize. It will be interesting to see which of the teams open their envelopes! The bonus prizes are small tokens which are genealogy related - bookmarks I created with genealogy slogans on them.

I think this will be quite a bit of fun and as long as my niece doesn't break her ankle again (as she did at the last family reunion at our place) we should be okay.