School scavenger hunt clues you can use tomorrow

Every clue below points at something that exists in almost every school. Take the ones that fit your building, change the words that do not, and ignore the rest. They are written so that a student has to go and look rather than guess from their seat.

Two practical notes before the list. Clues that name a person go stale the moment that person leaves, so prefer the place over the job title unless the person has been there thirty years. And read every clue out loud once before you print it, because the ones that work are the ones a nine year old can repeat to their partner from memory.

Around the classroom

1. Thirty of us wait in a row, and each one holds a different name. Come and find yours. (the coat hooks or the trays)
2. I am the only one in this room who is allowed to be loud, and only when something is wrong. (the fire alarm)
3. Hundreds of stories live here, and none of them are mine. (the class library)
4. I keep the day in order, and I am wrong twice a year. (the clock)
5. I am covered in words nobody wrote by hand. Find the longest one. (the word wall or a display)
6. Everything you will need this term is behind me, and you are allowed to open me. (the supply cupboard)
7. I show you what you did last week so you can see what you have learned. (the display board of work)
8. I am the biggest screen in the room and I do nothing until somebody asks. (the whiteboard or projector)

The corridor and the rest of the building

9. I am where you go when something hurts, and I hope you never need me. (the medical room)
10. I have a number on my door and no lessons happen inside me. (the office)
11. I am the noisiest room in the school at exactly one time every day. (the hall or canteen at lunch)
12. Two hundred pairs of shoes cross me a day and I never complain. (the main corridor)
13. I hold everything anybody has ever lost. Something in here has been waiting a year. (lost property)
14. I am a door you are only allowed through in an emergency. (the fire exit)
15. Look up. My name is on the wall and it belonged to a person. (a named building, hall or house board)
16. I tell you what is happening this week and nobody reads me. (the noticeboard)

The library

17. Find a book with a number on its spine between five hundred and six hundred, and write down its title. (non fiction, science)
18. Find the thinnest book on the shelf you are standing at. Now find the thickest.
19. Somewhere here is a book older than everyone in your group put together. Find one printed before you were born.
20. Find a book whose title is a question, and answer the question.
21. Find two books by the same author that are not next to each other.

The canteen and outside

22. I am the longest queue in the school and I move faster than you think. (the serving hatch)
23. Count how many bins are in this space, then find the one nobody uses.
24. Somewhere out here something is growing that nobody planted. Find it.
25. I am the only thing in the playground with a line painted around it. (a court or pitch marking)
26. Find the oldest tree you can see and put your arms around it. Can you reach?
27. I keep the rain off the people waiting and I have no walls. (the shelter or covered area)

Clues that make people talk to each other

28. Find somebody in another group who has the same shoe size as you.
29. Find somebody who has been at this school longer than you have.
30. Find an adult who is not a teacher, and ask them how long they have worked here.
31. Find somebody whose birthday is in the same month as yours.

Running it without losing anyone

Pairs, not groups of five. In a five, two people do it and three follow. In a pair, both have to think.

Give the boundaries out loud and then again in writing. Which floors, which doors, and where they come back to. Say the time they must be back rather than how long they have, because “twenty minutes” turns into thirty-five.

Tell the office you are doing it. Thirty students moving around a building unannounced is somebody else’s fire drill.

Have an answer for the group that finishes early, because one group always will. A second sheet of the talking clues above works, or send them back out to photograph their favourite stop.

Turning this into something that checks itself

Paper is fine. The reason to do it any other way is that paper cannot tell you whether a clue was solved or copied, and it cannot stop a group skipping to the end.

If you want that, you can put these same clues into a hunt students play from one link in the browser. Each clue becomes a stop, the answer gets checked when they type it, and you can put a QR code on the actual door so being there is the only way to complete it. Nothing installs on a school device and students do not sign up, so there is no account and no student email to worry about. You can also describe the hunt in a sentence and have a first draft written for you, then rewrite the clues in your own words, which is faster than starting from an empty page.

Either way the clues above are yours. Print them, change them, and use them for as many years as the building stays the same shape.