A fun Easter egg hunt puzzle idea

Home Easter egg hunts are a lot of fun. Put eggs all over the yard and house and set forth on finding them! But… what do you put inside? Candy? Little prizes? Empty so that the fun is just the finding?

I came up with a way to extend the hunt for another hour or so with a great puzzle activity. It turned out to be a really great morning.

I created a whole new puzzle where each egg contained a piece of a puzzle that turned into a home scavenger hunt which eventually led to one big prize. Was a total of ~50 pieces / eggs.

Step 1: Take Close Up Pictures

Go around the house and take ~8 pictures of areas of the house very close up. Macrophotography. Get so close up it is hard to recognize what the object or location actually is, but when you finally identify it, it clicks! World Magazine, which I used to get as a kid, always had a page at the end with photographs like this which inspired my idea. Another example https://www.businessinsider.com/close-up-photos-everyday-objects-2018-11

For example: this was inside one of our Lego constructions

Step 2: Print out these pictures

Step 3: Turn each into a puzzle

Cut up each picture into 7–8 pieces. Make sure your cuts have some shapes to them — it makes it more fun. And as you cut across the photographs, see if you can make it tricky to figure out just which fit with each other. Since one step of solving is just sorting which photo group is which.

Step 4: Set up internal scavenger hunt

Select one location / photograph to be the master location. Hide the prize here. And then take the pieces of this photograph and hide one piece each at the other 7 locations.

Step 5: Set up egg hunt

Take all of the other puzzle pieces and put each one into an egg. This is the most tedious step. Now hide the eggs all over your house / yard. If you do them inside, just make sure you don’t get near any of your scavenger hunt locations.

Step 6: Let them at it!

Their first step will be to collect all the eggs. Make sure they are all found.

Then they will have to sort and assemble the puzzle pieces into the different photographs.

Once assembled, they can find the location of the puzzle pieces for the final photo.

Then they assemble the final photo, identify the location, and receive the prize.

Have fun!