Valentine Treasure Hunt
My kids are super into mysteries and anything involving escape-room like puzzles. So I decided to make them work for their Valentine's treats!
To start, I left a red envelope on the kitchen counter. But instead of finding a Valentine card, they discovered this letter.
Lil C realized right away that some of the letters were underlined so she grabbed a pencil and began writing down everything that was underlined. The underlined letters spell "intheclosete2" or "in the closet e2." The e2 doesn't make much sense now, but it will soon. In hindsight, when 2 letters next to each other were both underlined it was easy to miss a letter. Next time I might capitalize the letters instead of underlining.
Anyway, so they went searching closets. Eventually they found this hanging inside the door of one of the closets.
Inside the box of Duplos, the kids found a magnifying glass and a small piece of paper with pictures on it.
After close inspection, Lil C and Squidgy eventually realized that there were pink ovals around all the teddy bears. So they ran off to search through their immense collection of stuffed animals.
There was a piece of paper tucked behind a teddy bear in Squidgy's closet. And if you look closely, you'll see the end of a spy pen sticking out next to the pelican's head. The paper appeared blank, but Lil C quickly caught on that there was probably an invisible message on it! And she was right!
My drawing leaves a little to be desired, but after debating if they were stockings, socks, or boots, they agreed that boots sounded like the most likely option. So off they ran to find some boots.
Near the front door were several pairs of shoes, including a pair of my boots. Inside Lil C found a key with a note attached. Only the note was a little hard to read...
On the kitchen table they found this piece of paper and a bowl of M&Ms. Squidgy tried to eat the M&Ms but Lil C made him stop because she realized the number of M&Ms must be key to cracking this clue. They counted 12 orange M&Ms, 15 yellow M&Ms, and 14 red M&Ms which spelled out "BED." Back upstairs we go! But whose bed is it??
Hmm...there's a suitcase on Mommy and Daddy's bed. And it's locked! Where's that key?
Finally! Success and Valentine treasures!
To set up your own Valentine treasure hunt, grab the printables here:
In addition to the printables you will need: a magnifying glass, spy pen, white paper with drawing of boots in invisible ink (if you don't have a spy pen you can always use a white crayon and leave some watercolors nearby), colored candies, a small lock with a key, and something to be locked like a suitcase. Happy hunting!
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