Family Reunion Activities
Family reunions are a great time to get to know your extended family a little bit better. Whether that's by playing a card game together or getting outside and going for a swim in a lake. These activities are great, and can help your relationships grow. So why not make the most of the summer or when ever your family reunion is and create activities that can help you get to know a little bit more about each family member. This past summer a scavenger hunt was just what our family reunion needed to break the ice just a little bit more.
A scavenger hunt
For a family reunion activities can be hard to plan, organize, and execute. The activity also needs to be engaging and worth while to all the members of the family for it to really be effective, and to make good use of the short time you have together. This past family reunion our family created a scavenger hunt, not just to run around and explore the new environment we were at for the reunion, but also to explore and get to know each other just a little bit better.
Story Time
To make a scavenger hunt that was engaging but also helped us meet each other, we gave a role to the hosts of the scavenger hunt to go around and ask a secret question to each member of the family about a story from their life, the questions were generated using chat gpt prompt like so:
We are at a family reunion. We have a scavenger hunt we are putting together. We want to add tasks that require the participants ask different family members different questions. Something like, where did Mary go to elementary school? The answers need to be validated, so there can only be one answer to each question. So to prep, we are going to ask people ahead of time and find the right answers. So the question should always have someone's name in it. make them interesting. Things that would be interesting in a family history.
We then took those questions filtered them, and refined them, by asking for further clarification like
Make them more interesting
The rest of the people are under 25
Questions such as "What recipe did this person create in college" were chosen due to their nature for a short answer. The family members could choose the question they liked best and had a good answer for, we just made sure there weren't duplicates to keep things interesting. We also made sure they had just a shortened answer of their story as the answer such as "truck" or bread".
For some members of the family asking them straight up for their favorite story was a good way to go. AI doesn't have insights into all of our lives and sometimes a simple question may never find you the best story.
The execution
We then used Seekr Games as our platform for the scavenger hunt, and put in all the questions and answers into a quick and easily accessible scavenger hunt. We also added in other tasks and items, such as finding random toys throughout the house, or exploring the property, using the image recognition tools that Seeker offers this was a breeze and worked beautifully during the hunt. The ability for each of them to join on their smart device using just a browser made it quick and easy so everybody was joined in and ready to go within a minute or so of hosting the hunt.
Once everyone was joined the hunt commenced and everyone was asking each other questions about their stories and getting the short answers, due to how quickly they wanted to finish the hunt, each person was eager and excited to be the winner and claim the crown of family champion. It was really fun to be able to sit back and watch as Seekr took care of the heavy lifting and verified all the users answers.
The wrap up
After the members of the family had discovered the last item in the hunt and all scrambled to not be the last. We all gathered around and went in a circle telling each other the full story to which we had briefly shared earlier. It was fun to remember what each answer was for the individual family member, and more fun to hear their fun stories. Usually they were funny or just straight up interesting. Through it we all learned just a little bit more about each other.
Everyone also loved using the Seekr platform. Even being out in a cabin in the woods, we were able to use the platform and it was quick and responsive. Enabling all users to use the AI image recognition tasks, which worked great. We even snuck in some tasks to chase down the family dogs and take a picture of them. After the hunt we got to enjoy all the fun pictures taken thanks to Seekr's reports section, we could enjoy blurry pictures of the dogs being chased down by the little ones with a camera in hand. Or enjoy group pictures of people who got together to complete tasks together.
Using Seekr you can implement your own group picture tasks, by defining in a description verification "group picture of people together" and it can verify a bunch of people together. Currently the technology is not yet there with the AI to recognize specific faces as well. But you can do specific shirt colors, or a specific shirt by passing in an image or adding the color purple to the description. This makes it so you can have someone who you need to take a picture with. Like the head of the family reunion the grandparents. Or others.
The platform also made it easy to figure out who won, and to see the rankings so we could give out prizes to first, second, third, and so forth. We could also look through the images to find things like funniest picture or other fun wacky prizes. Overall the scavenger hunt was a success.
Final thoughts
In the end a scavenger hunt was a great activity for our family reunion, and potentially one that will need to continue from year to year. Some tasks can bring out the competitive nature in family, and other tasks can bring out the puzzle powerful brainiacs. What's great about using a scavenger hunt, is they are getting more accessible, and they can be customize to your family needs. Whether that is creating a puzzle or telling stories. Or simply making a search and find items or objects. It can all be made to create the best experience for you and your family.
Below I've also included a list of some other fun activities you can potentially try out at your next family reunion.
Outdoor activities
Some activities with your family can be outdoors. These are great ways to get active and to spend quality time with others. Activities like these could include
9 Square
Swimming in a lake
Going for a bike ride or run
Cooking some hot dogs over an open fire
Rock climbing or going to a ropes course
Playing kickball or some other family friendly sport
Rock paper scissors tournement
Spikeball
Water balloon fight
Relay Race
Indoor Activities
Indoor activities depend on the place and size. But can also be really fun
A card game
A board game
Some online party game, such as Kahoot, Seekr Games, or Jackbox
Arts and crafts
Painting
Hide and Seek
Family Reunions are a time to get out of the normal routine and get to meet each other. Make your reunion the best it can be by creating a couple of engaging activities to kick it off right.
