World Book Day Treasure Hunt

This post was originally published on Picture Book Den, a blog about picture books by picture book authors and illustrators.

Last year's post on how to organise a "Picture Book World Cup" in schools got such a good response that I thought I'd follow up with a similar post on how to run a Picture Book Treasure Hunt.

Like the Picture Book World Cup, this is an activity that I originally ran with my former Patron of Reading school, Asfordby Captain's Close Primary in Leicestershire. We did our treasure hunts in June, which meant we were able to run them outside, in the school grounds, but a hunt would work just as well inside. And it would make an ideal book-themed activity for next week's World Book Day, which is why I'm blogging about it now!

A Captain's Close student discovers one of the question sheets.

We ran two separate treasure hunts: a picture book themed hunt for Key Stage 1 and a novel themed hunt for Key Stage 2. I'm going to describe how to run the KS1 picture book version, but the KS2 version works in a similar way and you can find information on it and links to download packs for both versions at the bottom of this post.

How the hunt works

The hunt is a race against time. The first student to complete it correctly wins. A winner's certificate is included in the download pack, but schools may want to offer a book as a prize as well.

Once they have completed the hunt, students will need to hand in their answer slip to a Hunt Collector (a nominated member of staff), so make sure all the students know who the Hunt Collector is and where they can be found before the hunt starts. 

If the hunts we ran are anything to go by, the winner is more likely to be a tortoise than a hare. Make it clear that the winner is the first student to hand in a CORRECTLY COMPLETED answer slip. The twentieth student to hand in their slip could still be the winner if the previous nineteen have not completed the hunt correctly!

It will take a little time to check the answer slips, so let the students know when the winner will be announced. If you're running the hunt in the morning, you might tell the students that the winner will be announced in an afternoon assembly.

The hunt uses a set of ten multiple choice question sheets like this one:

The question sheets are stuck up in different locations around the whole of the school. Before the hunt starts, make sure students know where they can and where they cannot look.

Students all start the hunt at the same time, but in any place, with any sheet. It makes sense to split students up as much as possible at the start so they begin in lots of different locations. That way, they will not all be looking for the same question sheet at the same time.

Each student is given an answer slip like this:

When a student finds their first sheet, they write down the big letter at the top in the first square of their answer slip. Then they read the question and decide which of the four book covers at the bottom of the sheet is the correct answer. Then the student has to find another sheet that has that book cover at the top and repeat the same process.

Students should be able to answer the questions in the KS1 hunt in the download pack by looking at the books' covers. Remind students that if they have a problem reading or understanding a question, they can ask a teacher for help.

As students search for the question sheet with the correct cover, they will probably spot other question sheets that they will need to find later on in the hunt, so students should try to remember where each sheet is, even if it's not the one they're currently looking for.

When a question leads a student back to the question sheet they began with, they should have a letter in each of the 10 boxes. They have now finished the hunt and should hand in their answer slip to the Hunt Collector straight away!

The first student to hand in a correctly completed answer slip to the Hunt Collector wins.

Tips for the organisers

Example question sheet: Before starting the hunt, use the example question sheet in the download pack to explain how the hunt works and what students have to do.

Synchronise the start: Agree an exact start time for the hunt, then split the students into small groups and ask a member of staff to accompany each group to a different part of the school to start the students at that time.

Leave time to find the winner: If the hunt we ran is anything to go by, the first students to hand in their slips will have got their letters in the wrong order and you will have to check through several incorrectly completed slips before finding a correctly completed winner.

When you announce the winner (preferably in an assembly), you might want to spread the credit and heighten the tension by revealing the top three hunters in reverse order.  If the school is feeling generous, they could give a prize to the runners-up too.

Tips for the Hunt Collector

Don't worry about marking the answer slips as they come in! The important thing is to keep a record of the order you receive them. So write a number in the top box in the top right corner of each slip as it is given to you.

The first few students to give you their answer slips will probably have filled them in incorrectly, so keep collecting the slips and recording the order you receive them in until you've collected them all or until the time programmed for the hunt is over.

Once you've collected all the answer slips, you can use the long marking strip in the download pack to check the sequence on each slip quickly. Starting with the first answer slip to be handed in, line up the first letter on the slip with the first occurrence of the same letter on the marking strip. If the student has completed the hunt in the right order all of the following letters will match those on the marking strip.

Use the long marking strip to check the sequence quickly, by lining up the first letter on the student's sheet with the same letter's first appearance on the strip.

If the sequence of letters on the first slips you check don't match the sequence on the marking strip exactly, put a cross where the sequence is broken. It's worth keeping rejected slips in the order they were collected in as, in the event that no student gets the whole sequence right, you will need to go back through the slips and pick out a winner with the longest correct sequence.  

Once you've found the winner you can fill out the certificate in the download pack and present it to them.

Foundation and Reception Simplified Option

Foundation and reception students can do an easier version of the hunt by simply finding all the question sheets and writing down all the letters. The winner is the first student to hand in a slip with all the correct letters in any order.

Hunt the Teacher Option

The download pack contains an off the peg version of the hunt that will work in any school. However, the original hunts we ran included extra questions about teachers' favourite books, as shown in the example below.

Additional Hunt the Teacher question sheets like this get

students talking to teachers about their favourite books.

To answer this question, students had to find the teacher and ask them which book was their favourite. This was a good way to show children that grown-ups enjoy reading and to get the students talking to staff about their choices. If you want to create your own version of the hunt using this option, you will need to ask staff to name their favourite books in advance so they can be written into the hunt. And if a staff member is unexpectedly away on the day (as was the case with one of our hunts), make sure another staff member knows the correct answer and that the students know who this is before they start the hunt.

Key Stage 2 Version

A download pack for an off the peg Key Stage 2 version featuring children's novels is also available below. This runs in exactly the same way as the KS1 version, but has the following tweaks to make it a little more difficult:

• There are 15 questions instead of 10.

• While the answers to some questions can be found by looking at the covers, others require a little knowledge of the books.

• On some question sheets, more than one of the covers at the bottom of the sheet can be found at the top of other sheets, so students can't just go looking for any of the four options like they can in the KS1 hunt - they need to find the sheet with the correct cover to get the correct sequence of letters. If students get back to the sheet they started with and haven’t got a letter in all 15 of the boxes, they will probably have skipped a few letters by answering a question incorrectly.

And of course, you can create your own KS2 hunt with some hunt the teacher question sheets just like the ones described for the KS1 version above.

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Use the links below to download a Treasure Hunt pack as a zip file.

DOWNLOAD THE KEY STAGE 1 TREASURE HUNT PACK

DOWNLOAD THE KEY STAGE 2 TREASURE HUNT PACK

For some more ideas for activities your school can do to celebrate World Book Day,

check out this page on Jo Cotterill's blog.

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For an exciting picture book race against time, check out my rhyming romp

The Silver Serpent Cup

illustrated by Ed Eaves, and published by Oxford University Press.

THE SILVER SERPENT CUP Top Trumps card game and colouring sheets

 

To mark the publication of Fast and Furry Racers: The Silver Serpent Cup, I’ve created a Top Trumps style card game featuring all twenty-four of the vehicles from the book.

You can download the full set of cards along with a rules envelope to store them in HERE.

In the last post I mentioned how impressed I was with Ed Eave’s vehicle design sketches when I first saw them. Ed has kindly agreed to make these available as a set of colouring sheets which you can download HERE.

Find out more about The Silver Serpent Cup on my web site

SANTA SABOTEURS: Download and play a festive version of the Werewolves card game.

This time last year, I wrote a blog post about the annual visit of the Puzzle Elf to the Emmett household. This year I thought I’d write about another of my family’s elf-based Christmas antics and give you the chance to join in the fun.

My family and many of our friends are big fans of the parlour game commonly known as Werewolves. Originally called Mafia, the game was invented in the 80s by Russian psychology student Dimitry Davidoff. It can be played with an ordinary pack of cards or even a few scraps of paper, but we usually play it with a proper deck of Werewolves cards like these.

Although the game has a distinctly Halloweeny feel, we play it all year round. It’s a popular fixture at our Christmas parties and a couple of years ago I decided to create a special festive version, called Santa Saboteurs, to play at this time of year.

This version of the game it set at Santa's North Pole workshop where the elves have been infiltrated by a small number of evil goblins — the Santa Saboteurs. The elves must root out the traitors in their midst and banish them from the workshop before Christmas is ruined for everyone!

If you fancy playing it yourself, you can download pdfs of the cards and rules below. The cards pdf contains both the card-fronts and the card-backs (with the snowflakes on). It’s best to print the cards pdf onto a sheet of A4 card or thick paper. Once you’ve printed out the card-fronts, turn the card/paper over and put it back into the printer to print the card-backs on the reverse side. Then cut carefully along the dotted lines to make your set of cards.

Click the images above to download pdf files of the cards and game rules

If you've never played Werewolves, don’t be put off by the length of the rules. Only one person, the moderator, needs to understand them fully and then he/she will be able to guide the other players throughout the game. Most people find the game easy to pick up once they start playing and it can be played with children as young as five.

The game is suitable for 8 to 24 players.

If you do make your own set, I hope you enjoy playing it as much as we do!

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For a darkly funny Christmas story about another would-be Santa Saboteur, 

check out The Santa Trap by me and Poly Bernatene.

The Lauralympics and 'Real Life Cluedo'

My daughter Laura turned thirteen a couple of weeks ago and to mark the occasion we had a party-cum-sporting-contest called the Lauralympics. There were five events – Table football, Playstation Dance Mat, Beaker Knockdown, Kerplunk and Quickfire Quiz – with gold, silver and bronze medals being awarded for each event.

A couple of weeks before the party, the guests divided themselves into three teams. Each team was asked to come up with a team name, a team anthem (to be sung by the winning team at each event’s medal ceremony) and a team flag (to be hoisted as the anthem was sung). After some deliberation, the teams decided to call themselves the Teacup Turtles, the Mighty Morphing Unicorns and the Rainbow Poopin’ Rabbits.

We made t-shirts for each team using iron-on transfers, bought some plastic medals, and improvised a winners’ rostrum and a flagpole out of some plastic crates and the handle of a fruit-picker.

Here are some photos of this momentous sporting occasion.

"If you build it, they will come." The competition venue awaits

Each team made their own flag.

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns take on the Teacup Turtles at table football.

The girls had not used a dance mat before, so my wife gave them a tutorial.

My daughter proudly hoists the Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits Flag during a medals ceremony

It's only a matter of time before Kerplunk is included in the real Olympics.

You don't want to get between this girl and her stack of beakers!

Everything to play for in the final Quickfire Quiz event.

The Teacup Turtles

The Mighty Morphing Unicorns

The Rainbow Poopin' Rabbits

Real Life Cluedo

To add some extra fun to the proceedings we played a special Lauralympics version of Real Life Cluedo throughout the party.

Loosely based on the Cluedo board game, Real Life Cluedo is a great game to play if you’re staying with friends or family for a weekend. In the regular version of the game all the players are given three small pieces of paper. Each player writes their name on the first, an object that can be found around the house on the second and a room in the house on the third. Each of the three pieces of paper is folded and put into one of three bowls along with the other players pieces. The contents of the bowls are mixed up and then each player takes a piece of paper from each bowl. If a player draws their own name from the first bowl, they simply put it back and draw another. It doesn’t matter if a player picks out the same object or room that they put into the bowl.

Each player will now have a secret murder mission consisting of the name of another player, an object and a room. To win the game a player has to survive being "murdered", while murdering as many of the other players as possible, starting with the name they've just drawn.

For example, David has picked “Josie”, “Book” and “Kitchen” out of the bowls. David will have "murdered" Josie if she accepts or picks up a book while she’s in the kitchen. Josie must accept or pick up the book of her own accord - David can’t drop it into her lap or force it upon her in any other way. Once Josie has been murdered, she’s out of the game, but she passes on her own murder mission to David. If David completes Josie’s murder mission, he has to carry out the next victim’s mission and so on. If someone murders David, his murderer picks up David’s mission at that time.

If David murders a player who has a mission to murder him, he becomes a survivor and can stop playing. Depending on how the game plays out, a player may be able to murder all of the other players, but the game often results in a draw if two or more survivors succeed in murdering whoever is trying to murder them.

The regular version of the game described above can take days to play out and the Lauralympics only lasted a few hours. So to speed things up, I wrote the murder missions in advance and combined the objects and rooms on one piece of paper, choosing objects that would definitely be found in those rooms. To make it even easier, there was a choice of two rooms for each mission.

The murder missions we used for our simplified version of the game.

This simplified version of the game worked really well. One of the girls went on a killing spree, murdering six other players during the party before being murdered herself in the final half hour and we ended up with two survivors just before the party finished.

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Christmas is coming - and so is the Puzzle Elf's Treasure Hunt!

Christmas day in the Emmett household always begins with a treasure hunt. It started when the kids were little and has since become a family tradition. It’s not one of those treasure hunts where clues or riddles lead you to particular objects (although we love doing those too) - it’s more like a quiz with an element of Hunt the Thimble. I thought I’d write a post about it in case anyone fancied doing something similar.

Every Christmas morning the family come downstairs to find all of the presents have been taken from under the Christmas tree and moved into a locked "Treasure Room" at the back of the house. This is the work of the Puzzle Elf, one of Santa's lesser known little helpers with a propensity for tricksy questions.

A rare photo of the original Puzzle Elf, caught shortly after he hid his letter in our Christmas Tree.

Hidden somewhere on the Christmas tree is a letter from the Elf, along with a gridded map showing both floors of the house and a piece of paper with two questions written on it.

The Puzzle Elf’s treasure map.

The questions always come in pairs with five multiple choice answers for each. Each question is for a particular member of the family. For some reason the Puzzle Elf never sets me any questions — I assume it's because she thinks I’m either far too clever or far too stupid. One set of answers in each pair of questions is accompanied by a set of letters, the other by a set of numbers. The correct answers to both questions will give a grid reference on the map (e.g. E-5) where another pair of questions is hidden. There are always 12 questions in all (6 pairs), the topics are always books, movies, science and history with each family member getting a question on each topic.

Here are some of the Puzzle Elf’s questions from last Christmas

The last pair of questions reveals the location of the key to the Treasure Room. When the key has been found and the Treasure Room has been unlocked, the family can open their presents.

The key is wrapped in a piece of paper. 

It usually takes about an hour to find the key but both our kids insist that the Puzzle Elf keeps coming each year.


If you think your family might enjoy doing a similar treasure hunt (you don’t have to do it at Christmas), here are a few tips.

• It’s nice to find a key, but If you don’t have a room, cupboard or wardrobe you can lock the presents in, the final piece of paper could simply reveal where the presents are hidden (e.g. In the garden shed or under mum and dad's bed).

• The map of the house doesn’t need to be as neatly drawn as the one shown above (I suspect that the Puzzle Elf, like me, used to be an architect). A hand drawn map on squared paper will do just as well, but make sure each grid square only covers a small area of the floor plan as the larger the grid square, the larger the area of house that will need to be searched.

• Try to pick questions that only the family member they're addressed to will know the answer to so that everyone will feel they have played a part in finding the treasure. The Puzzle Elf usually sets questions on books and films that family members have read or watched in the last year or topics they’ve been studying at school. If your family is especially bookish, all of the questions could be about books. 

• Clues can be held in place with sticky tape or Blu-Tack, but should be in plain sight, so that searchers don’t have to move or open anything to find them, although they may have to look underneath or around the back of an object. 

The Puzzle Elf rolls the clues up into tight scrolls to make them more difficult to spot.

In our house, the first clue and map are always accompanied by a letter from the Puzzle Elf. The Puzzle Elf's job has changed hands over the years. The original Puzzle Elf went on paternity leave a few years back and that year the Easter Bunny had to cover for him. However he was back at work the next year and was training up his daughter, Flummox, as an apprentice. The original elf has now retired and Flummox has taken over from him.

If your family are the doing the treasure hunt for the first time, it’s a good idea to include some sort of letter with instructions. Here’s some instructions from one of the original Puzzle Elf’s letters that you can adapt for your own use:

Santa has put all your presents in the Treasure Room at the back of the house. He has locked the room and hidden the key somewhere safe. To make sure that you - and only you - can find the key, he has set a treasure hunt that only the three of you, working together, can solve. 

There are 6 pairs of multiple-choice questions. 

The two answers to each pair will give you a grid reference on the house plan provided. 

The next pair of questions can be found somewhere in that location. 

The questions are divided into three groups and each of you will have to answer 4 questions each. 

The final pair of questions will give you the location of the key. 

Good luck and happy hunting!

If the Puzzle Elf has inspired you to do your own treasure hunt, do let me know - and I'll pass the message on to her! And if you already have your own Christmas treasure hunt, I’d love to hear about that too.

Munching Monsters Card Game

Whenever I have a new book coming out, I try to come up with a related game, puzzle or activity to go in the games section of my website. For Here Be Monsters I decided to make a card game that readers could print out and make for themselves. It’s a “pirate memory game” – a phrase that I’ll always associate with the very funny Little Britain sketch that you can watch here.

Click here to go to my site and download the game

It’s one of those games where you collect cards by find matching pairs, but to make it a little different and hopefully a little more fun I’ve added some extra monster cards that change the way the game is played. When he first started working on the book, illustrator Poly Bernatene produced a set of individual character sketches of each of the pirates and he sent me these to use on the cards. The book is also being published in Spain and Argentina and Poly is producing a Spanish version of the game which will be available through his own web site.

I thought it might be fun to shoot a video showing how to play the game, so I asked next-door-neigbours Finn and Seth to me to help me make one. The book is dedicated to Seth and I gave him a set of the playing cards so that he and Finn could practice playing it before we shot the video. We filmed ourselves playing the game a couple of times and Seth won both times!

If you're wondering how we did it, the front shot of the video was taken with a camera mounted atop a kitchen cupboard and the overhead shot was taken simultaneously with my iPhone which was cantilevered out from another cupboard using a timber joist and G-clamp as shown below. Then the two shots were cut together using Final Cut on an iMac.

Click here to find out about HERE BE MONSTERS,

the picture book the game is based on