Angie attended her annual "College Girls Weekend" this past weekend and that meant a Potter Boys Weekend for me and #1 and #2. This would be our last official Potter Boys Weekend since we will be having our first daughter in May. Next year....Potter Boys and a Girl Weekend!

I had three main goals for the weekend:
1) be positive ~ I wanted to do something that would allow each boy to shine and feel proud about what they created
2) be educational ~ I wanted the boys to learn things that would be valuable (not just today) for the rest of their lives
3) be creative ~ the arts and creativity are vital and I wanted the weekend to be completely creative

So, last week I poked around our rather extensive game collection, library of books, and picked through all our digital game options. The boys love all my cameras and joining me in the studio to film all sorts of things. I decided to create a picture scavenger hunt across North Texas and wanted to include places that I was (personally) interested in. I didn't want to be guided by what the convention and visitors bureaus would typically suggest.....it had to be places that had either significant historical meaning or the site had to hold a significant record of some kind. Matter of fact, some of the places would require the average person to do some more digging then just a basic Google search before they can figure out the significance. I figured this would be a fun little thing for me and the boys and so the creation process began.

I immediately new the top 20 places I wanted to cover......some obvious places....Sixth Floor Museum in downtown Dallas or Cowboys Stadium (the new example of epic excess). Other places....a Landfill all the way to the first Ikea store in the area. The game board grew to 26 items and it was going to be tough to get through the entire game.

Sam and Luke have their own cameras and I had my trusted Canon 5D Mark II 22mp......I had to ensure I had a step up on the youngsters. It turned out to be a very rainy Saturday but that didn't stop us. We hit all the sites except for four and we returned to those on Sunday. The objective of each site visit was to capture a unique image of the site and we would talk about the significant fact that I had found for each one. The boys really loved talking about the history and significance of each place. Luke loved visiting Thanksgiving Tower in downtown Dallas and he really seemed to become engaged with the unique architecture of some of the places we visited. Sam was enthralled by the entire experience and his favorite places by far had to do with trains and airplanes.

What made this entire adventure so fun was the communication. By incorporating visuals, active participation (holding their own maps to taking actual photos), and talking about each site before we arrived and as we were leaving.....all this made for an extremely full experience. The only cost related to the game was gasoline for the car. We covered over 150 miles during our day and a half adventure but we will have years to reflect on our first (of what will be many more) picture scavenger hunt.

If you are thinking of things to do and your kids enjoy car rides and seeing new places....give the picture scavenger hunt a try....you may find that your creativity will create a better game than anything you have stored in your closet.

*You can quickly create a game board by doing a simple Image search on Google or Yahoo! (any search engine) and copying and pasting the images into a Pages or Word document. Print our your game board (we dropped ours into clear page protectors since it was raining) and off you go!