Today I’m excited to be taking part in the A-Z of Pretend Play Activities Blog Hop hosted by Nicola at Crafty Kids at Home!

We chose the letter E for Explorers as my children love to explore. Over the school holidays we explored lots of places from the beach, canals to country houses but our favourite was our overnight stay at Whipsnade Zoo. We took part in a treasure hunt exploring the zoo, helped feed some of the animals and drove around some of the enclosures. The children have talked about our trip to the zoo quite a lot so I thought it would be fun to re-create our zoo experience at home with an Explorer Scavenger Hunt.

Explorer Scavenger Hunt and toilet roll binoculars

Everybody knows that Explorers need binoculars and a good map. First of all we made our own binoculars using cardboard tubes and some fun zebra patterned paper we found. We tied them together with colourful Baker’s Twine and we were ready to go.

We organised an animal scavenger hunt. We looked through our toy boxes to find as many toy animals as we could, looking especially for ones we had seen at the zoo.

Then we took it in turns to hide the animals around the living room. We had a couple of rules – not to hide the animals too high out of reach of the 3 year old, and not to hide them completely from view.

They took it in turns making explorer maps, marking the furniture, doors and an X for where the treasure could be found.

They donned the binoculars and went on a hunt, following the clues on their treasure map to find the animals. This kept them amused for ages and they started hiding 5 toy animals, then 10, and so on until they couldn’t remember what they had hidden or where it was!

Don’t forget to check out the other participants in the A-Z of Pretend Play Activities Blog Hop