Digital Alphabet Hunt Take Two

FYI: Be forewarned that this is a long post.  Lots of words.  Quite a few pictures.

Over the weekend, I held a digital alphabet hunt with some of my adult children and their spouses, some adorable grandchildren, and my husband.

(See?  I told you that my grandchildren were downright adorable!!)

I learned something from the experience and thought that I would pass it along to you, Gentle Reader, so that you can benefit from my vast (ahem!) wisdom. So here it is — the Digital Alphabet Hunt take two!

But first though, a bit of foundational information. I put a half hour limit on the activity.  This added a bit of pressure but I think it was good and made it fun.  That meant people had to think quick and not dawdle.  It wasn’t about taking National Geographic quality pictures.  It was more on getting pictures of all of the letters and getting back to ‘home base’ within half an hour.

I wanted to have some sort of award to give but my little pea-brain couldn’t come up with anything.  Well, actually, I did have a few thoughts but not the time to get the stuff and create it.   Sigh.

Even though I had told everyone to bring a digital camera, one couple forgot theirs.  No problem!  I gave them my camera and used my sweet little iPhone as my camera. (Thought: you m might want to have a spare camera in case something like this happens on your digital alphabet hunt.)

Each couple was a ‘team’ and went out together to take pictures.  I think this helped because you had two sets of eyes and two brains going.  I was extremely grateful for my husband’s creative eyes because he ‘saw’ some letters that were very creatively formed.  You’ll see what I mean in a moment.

Now, here’s what I learned.

I learned (and everyone agrees) was that it was very difficult to keep track of the letters that we had taken pictures of.  My daughter suggested that we have a paper with the alphabet written down on it so the letter could be crossed off when the picture was take.  Great idea!!!

Not only would it be easier to keep track of the ‘letters’ that you have pictures of, you wouldn’t have to spend time going back through them (like I did) to see what you got because you couldn’t remember.

After half an hour, we gathered around to show the pictures that we had taken.  Here’s the other thing that I learned.  It was difficult to scrunch around small camera picture viewers to see the pictures.  It would have been nicer to be able to see them on a bigger screen — either a computer or TV.  So, next time, I’ll make sure that we have appropriate cables to hook to the computers.  (We had the computers.  We had a huge HD TV, too.  Just not the cables.  Rats!)

Here are some of the alphabet letters that we found.

The letter A

The letter G.

The letter N.

The letter D.

The letter P.

The lower case letter R. Can you see it? My husband found this one. He is so clever.

The letter W.

Afterward, we also brainstormed about some variations on this idea.  They were terrific ideas so I wrote them down to share with you here.

1. Take pictures of the alphabet in the correct order — from A to Z.
2. Give the teams a phrase.  They have to take pictures of the letters IN THE ORDER that they are in the phrase.
3. To make it even more difficult, tell them that if another person takes a picture of the same thing to represent the same letter they can’t count it.  Like in Scategories.
4. Do a photo scavenger hunt.  They are given a list of things to find and take pictures of like a garbage can, a flip flop for the right foot, a hamburger, stairs.  Adjust the list according to where the scavenger hunt takes place (a park, mall, etc.).  If you do this at a mall, you might want to stipulate that you can only get one picture per store.
5. Do ‘faces in places.’  Take pictures of things that created a face.  Then, when you gather back together, have them ‘submit’ their 3 best faces.  Vote on which is the best and give some prize.
6. If you have lots of grandchildren, have some of them lay on a lawn and spell out a letter or word with their bodies.  Little grandchildren could form the letters while the older ones could be the picture takers.

Whew!  This was a long post.  (But I warned you in the beginning!)