Hide, Seek, Learn : an Egg-cellent Scavenger Hunt Twist

One of my favorite ways to get students moving—and burn off some energy—is a running dictation or a flipped running dictation (you can read more about flipped running dictations here). Once the weather turns nice, the kids are eager to get outside (and honestly… so am I). The challenge, of course, is keeping them engaged and learning.

Read more about flipped running dictations

One spring, right around Easter, I had an idea: an Easter egg hunt would be fun, but how could I make it academic enough to count as class time? The answer was simple—flipped running dictation!

I filled each egg with a question related to the text we were reading. Each group had a set of 4–6 eggs, all the same color, so every team had its own color to search for. I also didn’t want to hide two dozen eggs myself, and wanted the kids to run around more, so I had them hide the eggs.

I gave each group their color‑coded eggs and told them they would be the ones hiding them. With some clear guidelines—no climbing trees, all eggs must stay within the designated space, eggs must be retrievable, no touching other teams’ eggs, etc.—I let them scatter and hide their sets. They had five minutes to complete the task.

Once all the eggs were hidden, I assigned each group a different color to find and set a time limit. They had to locate all the eggs in their assigned color before they could open them and start answering the questions inside. The result? Lots of movement, lots of excitement, and plenty of meaningful learning along the way.

Tip: If a group can’t find one of their assigned eggs, have the team that hid it give hot/cold clues. It keeps the game moving and adds a fun collaborative twist.

Other ideas to use this activity:

• Trivia or review questions

• Order the sentences

• Translation sentences

• Puzzle (after students put the puzzle together, they write to describe it)

• Fix the mistake

• Conjugation tasks

• Speaking prompts (each topic must be talked about for 1-2 minutes before moving on to the next egg)

• QR codes with audio or video tasks

• short readings with comprehension questions

• Story elements - a character, setting, problem- then students work together to write the story

• Mix & Match! One egg will have a speaking prompt, one a reading, and one a writing task