School's out for summer - so it's time for a flower scavenger hunt! (Plus a singing time application for flowers)

In Utah, most of the schools are out for summer. How about where you live? I love the noticeable increase in volume in my neighborhood in early June, signs that children are out and about in the neighborhood, looking for a little bit of adventure. We live on a hill, so the signs of school being out are a little more obvious, as we hear the sounds of laughter and screaming as children zoom down our hill on their bicycles as fast as they dare.

Today, I've combined my personal love for gardening and flowers with a little bit of a scavenger hunt for your children. I've created four "Bingo cards." Each card has the same sixteen late Spring flowers that are readily available in people's gardens for the next couple of months, particularly in the United States.

To print, simply right-click on each card to save to your desktop, then print. (TIP: Set your printer to print two copies per page for smaller cards.)

This activity can be completed in two ways:

1. Let children find as many flowers as they can!

2. See which child can find four in a row first. The four in a row, second, etc.

3. There are little boxes in the upper right-hand corner for children to mark when they have found a flower. Or, you can buy them a pack of stickers and staple it to the edge of the paper to place over the white boxes when they find a match.

I've created a fifth card that they can also use (the first one above), but this is an exact match of card 1 (numbers in bottom left corner of the card), with the only difference being that I used photos of the flowers zoomed back so you can see the flower buds in the context of how they grow, as well as the names of the actual flowers for enquiring minds that want to know. 

Obviously, depending on where you live and the age of your children, I don't recommend sending your children out alone to play this game. This can be a fun family activity as well as something that can be carefully implemented for a group of children. Please be responsible and wise with safely sending your children out!

Singing Time application

If you are a children's chorister, you can easily bring this game into the classroom. Instead of real flowers, print photos of the flowers to place around the room. You can mount them on a generic flower drawing, so the actual flower can't be seen. When children have their name chosen out of the jar, they get to choose and turn around one of the flowers. Whatever flower they turn around will have either a song to sing, a question about the song for children to answer, a line from the song for everyone to sing, or a fun way to sing the song. If you've printed the bingo cards for each child or each class (I recommend doing this by class), then the next step is that they also get to mark the flower that was selected to see who gets bingo first as a class. You might not have time for four in a row. You might want to look for three in a row, or if you run out of time, even say "did anyone get two in a row?" and declare them the winner.

Choristers, send me your email if you want a downloadable PDF with a larger-sized version of the flowers to print and use in your lesson.

Parents, let me know what you think! If this is a hit with children and families, I have other ideas I would love to implement.