Literacy Scavenger Hunt Bottle

The idea for a letter i-spy bottle has been around for a long time.  I saw lots of ideas on Pinterest (listed below), but none using Safari's Good Luck Mini Wild Fun Pack.  For this week's #HowiSafari blog post, I'm featuring a Safari themed literacy bottle.

First, gather your Safari mini animals, something to use as a filler (usually a grain or something similarly small), and an empty plastic bottle.  Depending on your literacy focus, you could add mini letter tiles, letter beads, or words written on cardstock.  You might also chose to add more animals or objects and challenge the student to write the animal's name from memory or to mark it off on a worksheet.

For my preschoolers, I chose to make a Letter Safari Bottle.  I added yellow lentils, letter tiles, and Safari's Mini Animals to a Smart Water brand plastic bottle.  I chose not to glue on the lid, and I'm glad that I took the risk.  After playing around with it for a while, I decided that the beads were too heavy for the substrate and didn't make a very good i-spy bottle.  The kids weren't ready for a full-alphabet scavenger hunt anyways, so it worked out.

Free Printable- recording sheet in either color or black and white.  The children can either mark out the letter with either a counter (rock, coin, bean, etc) on the colored copy or they can color in the letter on the b&w page.  The recording pages that I made for the popcorn letter games would be useful in this activity as well.

As the kids get older, I plan on adding words to my Safari literacy bottle.  I made this word safari printable for that purpose.  Either the words or the pictures can be added to the bottle and then matched with either the words or the pictures on a recording sheet.  Even non-readers could match pictures to pictures.  Fluent readers could be asked to match words to words.  The pictures came from one of my favorite Teachers Pay Teachers shops, Educlips.

I dumped out the letter bottle and added the mini picture from my printable.  The kids really enjoyed seeing the 3D  Safari mini animals while they hunted for the 2D pictures.  I glued the picture to their match so that there was no wrong side to the pictures.  This made it a lot easier for the kids to find the animals.  The bottle also created some good discussion and vocabulary building as we talked about the different animals.

Dragonfly is begging me to let her play with the little animals, so I think a sensory bin is next.

Safari's Good Luck Mini Wild Fun Pack are just the right size for an Altoid tin.  For our summer road trip last summer, I made the kids a safari small world for them to play with in the car.

And that's how we Safari!

More Ideas From the Web
- vocab bottle and matching book
- synonyms for cold bottle
- floating glow-in-the-dark words
- sight words

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For more #HowiSafari Ideas- follow my Safari Ltd board on Pinterest!