Hurry up and wait — that pretty much sums up the feeling of the last few weeks of the school year. There are so many things that need to be accomplished, but there is also a lot of downtime as students are finishing up final projects and studying for exams. It’s both relaxing and stressful, and I inevitably end up needing some end of the school year activities for students to do while I am finalizing grades. Luckily, I found a fun way for students to stay engaged in our photography material, and have some fun — a photo scavenger hunt!

I created a scavenger hunt that includes photos that test my students’ DSLR knowledge, as well as compositional skill. I also threw in a bunch of fun and unusual types of subject matter so that students would find it challenging to complete all of the photos.

The best way I’ve found to assign the challenge is to have interested students team up. The members of each team of students can all add photos to one list. Once the team feels like they completed the most of the items, I can check their photos with them and then mark down the number that they completed. The team with the most items completed gets a prize (usually candy).

My students have always seemed to enjoy this activity and it still reinforces many of the skills and concepts we learned throughout the year. You could take this idea and adapt it to fit with other art classes or other subjects as well.

The great thing about assignments like this is that students have to work together to figure out what some of these terms mean and how to capture them in a photo. It also makes the students have to apply what they learned during the year, helping to solidify the concepts in their minds.

If you teach a photography class, feel free to download a printable .pdf of my scavenger hunt list below. Enjoy, and here’s to the end of another school year!