Autumn scavenger hunt for kids
Autumn is the easiest season to run a scavenger hunt in. Everything changes colour, the ground is covered in things worth picking up, and a walk that would be boring in July is suddenly full of stuff.
Thirty autumn things to find
Sorted roughly by difficulty. The first group suits younger children and works almost anywhere. The last group needs a bit more looking, which is what keeps older kids in the game.
Easy, findable on any street
A yellow leaf. A red leaf. A leaf bigger than your hand. A conker. A conker shell. An acorn. A puddle. A bare branch. Someone in a coat. Muddy shoes.
Medium, needs a park or a proper walk
A spider web. A mushroom. Berries on a branch. A pine cone. A squirrel. A crunchy pile of leaves. Frost or dew. A bird on a wire. Something growing on a tree trunk. A seed that spins when you drop it.
Harder, for the ones who think it is too easy
Three different shades of the same colour. A leaf with a hole eaten in it. Something that smells like autumn. An animal footprint. A tree older than your house. Something the wind moved. A shadow longer than you are tall. The last flower still out. Something that was green last month. A sign that an animal has been eating.
Where to run it
A park or woodland is the obvious choice and gives you the whole list. But an autumn hunt works fine on an ordinary residential street, which matters on the days when nobody has the energy to drive anywhere. Front gardens, street trees and the gutter after a windy night will cover most of the easy group.
If you are near water, a canal path or riverbank is the best of the lot in autumn. Leaves collect on the surface, birds are easier to spot, and there is usually something growing where the bank meets the path.
When it rains, and it will
Two options that both work better than cancelling.
Do it anyway with a shorter list. Six items, wellies, twenty minutes. Rain adds puddles, drips and the smell of wet leaves, and children mind it considerably less than adults do.
Or move it indoors and change the target from nature to colour. Find something orange, something brown, something that crunches. It is a different game but it scratches the same itch on a wet Tuesday.
Making it last longer than one walk
The thing that turns a single walk into a habit is having something to come back to. A list you keep, a tally that carries over, a reason to go out again on Thursday.
If you are doing it on paper, keep the sheet on the fridge and tick things off across a few weeks rather than trying to clear it in one go. Autumn lasts two months; a thirty-item list does not need to be a single afternoon.
In the app the same thing happens through streaks and the daily hunt, which is deliberately small: one thing to find, every day. It is a lower bar than organising a walk, and it is the reason families keep going out when the weather turns.
Want the version that runs itself?
Scavvi does the list, checks the finds and keeps the score, so you get to just be there. Free on iOS and Android.
Get Scavvi freeQuestions
What age is an autumn scavenger hunt for?
The easy list works from about three. The harder list holds the attention of a ten or eleven-year-old. Running both at once is how most families with a range of ages do it.
Do we need to collect the things we find?
No, and mostly you should not. Photographing a find works better than pocketing it: nothing gets carried home, nothing gets picked that should be left, and you end up with the walk recorded rather than a bag of soggy leaves.
How long should it take?
Half an hour is plenty for younger children. A full thirty-item list is better spread across several walks than forced into one.
What if we live somewhere without woods?
Most of the easy and medium list is findable on an ordinary street or in a small park. Street trees, front gardens and puddles do most of the work.