A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

My kids love a good treasure hunt. What they don’t realize is that what takes them 15 minutes to complete, took me a week to plan! I have talked before about how we went from zero screen time before the pandemic to a few shows a day. One of our shows we like to watch is Jake and the Neverland Pirates. It’s a cute show, not super annoying, and it teaches kids about friendship, kindness and problem solving.

On school vacation break, I put together a fun Jake and the Neverland Pirates theme day for them. We ended the day with an epic treasure hunt, but lets look at some other fun stuff I put together.

I picked up these jumbo Jake and the Neverland Pirates coloring books for $1 at Party City. You can find boxes of crayons for $1 at Five Below. Next, I saw these cute treasure chests at Michaels and used a 20% off coupon to buy them. I filled the treasure boxes with gold coins and Hershey’s Nuggets. The treasure boxes were the prize at the end of the treasure hunt!

For the treasure hunt, I printed out old maps and wrote rhyming clues on them. The kids all worked together to solve the riddles and finish the treasure hunt. Afterwards, they decorated their treasure boxes with markers and stickers.

I made these fun hooks out of red solo cups. I made a slit in the top and pushed in the “hook” which I had traced on cardboard and covered with tin foil. In addition, I printed out skull and crossbones and taped them to the end of the cup that you drink out of. I attached a long paper towel roll to the bottom of the solo cup and they used them as telescopes. Finally, we made these “sea globes”.

First step, find an empty bottle of your choice. I used Voss water bottles because I like the shape. Use a funnel to add in some sand to the bottom. You can buy sand on Amazon or any craft store.

We are a strictly no glitter household, but I made this one exception. Second step, we poured gold glitter into the bottle on top of the sand to make it look like “treasure”.

Thirdly, we threw in some sea shells. You can buy them at a craft store or you can use ones that you have found yourself. I picked these up at Lakeshore Learning.

Next, fill the bottle up with water and add in a few drops of food coloring. While some chose a blue or a green, one went with red just because it looked pretty!

Finally, use a hot glue gun to seal the lid onto the bottle so there are no spills. Viola!

Tags: crafts, kid friendly