Hi! Future Ticia 2026 here and I’m about to go visit the Dallas Arboretum, or Dallas botanical gardens, and it got me to thinking about this botanical garden scavenger hunt I made all these years ago for my kids and how it was such a great science lesson as it forced my kids to really work on their observation skills. This could just be a great basic science skill lesson (observation skills) or it could be part of a Botany Unit. Now back to past Ticia 2013.
My mother-in-law loves botanical gardens, and I have to admit I enjoy going to them also; they’re just so peaceful and calm. Kids, however, don’t necessarily want to look at endless plants all day long. My kids enjoy running around and creating their own adventures, but I also want to work on their observational skills.
So last time we went there as my kids were climbing on the butterfly chairs and exploring the fossil garden, I took pictures. A lot of pictures, not quite as many as I really needed to make a good botanical garden scavenger hunt (or at least not several ones….), but many many pictures.
And not of flowers, I wanted this botanical garden scavenger hunt to be evergreen. If I took pictures of flowers, when we come back in 2 months, they won’t be able to find a thing. Instead, I took pictures of the dinosaur footprints and the buildings. I took pictures of rocks. Small details that are by the flowers.
Then I popped over to Picmonkey and made a collage using one of their “square deal” frames. I chose 3×3 because it let me make a wider variety, but you could obviously increase the numbers with older kids, and make the pictures more difficult.
Then I made about 10 “Zilker Botanical Garden scavenger hunt pictures” all thrown into a Word document and saved so I can print them out. If you JOIN MY NEWSLETTER, you can get them for free on my subscriber page.
(I’m planning to make a set for Dallas Arboretum when we go up there this weekend and add that in too)
How to make your own botanical garden scavenger hunt
- Look for distinctive features that will not change. A bench, a rock, a specific building that they will recognize. Most botanical gardens are built around features like that, so even when flowers are not blooming, there is still something to see.
- Take more pictures than you think you will need. In my first attempt, I did not take enough pictures. To have a good sampling, I would suggest at least 50 pictures, that lets you have a good sampling to switch between for your bingo sets.
- Decide what size bingo sheet you want to create and what expectations you will have. I created a 3×3 bingo sheet, and that lets me easily adapt it for different ages. Younger kids can work to complete a row or column, and older kids can work for a blackout.
How to use the bingo sheet and ways to extend the learning
As I mentioned just for the surface level, you can vary what you require depending on their age. Younger kids complete a row or a column, and older kids fill out the entire sheet.
But, let’s take it further. They can then take what they have and figure out whether or not the features in the row are majority manmade items or natural items. Or maybe your botanical gardens are divided into different styles like Austin is, we have a rose garden, a Zen garden, and a “pre-historic,” and they could work to figure out where each picture is from.
Or, you can have them take the pictures from the row they completed and work that into a short story. That can cause them to be thinking ahead for how they fill in their bingo card.
How would you have them extend the learning?
Back to past Ticia 2013 and my plans for the botanical garden scavenger hunt
So, this Friday when we go there on a field trip with friends, I’ll hand out a copy of my “Zilker Botanical Garden scavenger hunt” to each of the kids (yes, I am having fun making it sound ridiculously official). I’ll probably laminate them and do it with dry-erase markers, and then let them trade around.
I think it will be popular what about you? (Spoiler, it was popular, and I kept them in the car for years) Have you ever made anything like this? I had a theory of doing this once before when the kids were younger, but it was much harder to put together in the days before Picmonkey.
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