Treasure Hunts are great activities to engage and motivate students to learn, master, and review standards-based concepts and skills within a topic or set of topics. Students are given a series of “clues” that require students to read and comprehend facts or information that is given to them and answer a question or perform a task. Students must successfully complete a clue to be able to go on to the next clue. Each clue becomes successively more rigorous and complex than the one before it. Educators often offer a “treasure” or reward for successfully completing all the clues. This activity works well for individual as well as small groups of students.
Educators may also use treasure hunts with the whole class to review standards and prepare students for high stakes testing. Students can be grouped together in teams and compete against each other to complete the treasure hunt. Activities such as this intrinsically motivate students to work together to complete each of the clues. Teams of students can get feedback from the educator as to whether they have successfully completed each of the clues as they successively work on them. A “prize” for the the team who successfully completes the treasure hunt first makes this activity even more worthwhile.
The benefits of treasure hunts include:
-review content area concepts and skills to prepare for tests
-assess and monitor mastery of content area standards
-develops higher order thinking skills
-engage and motivate students
-develops reading, comprehension and writing skills
-develops problem solving skills
-collaborate and interact with other students
-can be used across the curriculum
-develops web searching skills