Geocaching After School Clubs Lesson Plans

[djpjr123 0]

Does anyone have good lesson plans for geocaching clubs?

[+Teacherese 0]

I host an after school Geocaching Club once a month for 1 1/2 hours. I capped the class at 15 fourth and fifth grade students. Parents pay a tuition which covers my compensation. We have about a 5 acre campus which limits our space for hiding caches. I plan for 2 hides each month. I try to be as creative as possible. I use many riddles, puns, and plays on words in my titles and clues. I start out each session with several of the videos posted on the geocaching website. Then we take time to decrypt the clues. We go out on campus to find the caches. We take turns "driving" because at this point, I have only one GPS. We also take time to CITO. I am always amazed at how much trash they collect! ( I save my plastic sleeves from my daily newspaper to use to collect the trash. They put one plastic sleeve on their hand to keep clean, and use the other sleeve to collect the trash.) I take photos of the FTF students. I also end up back in the classroom for a snack and wrap up.

[+Geomarm 0]

Does anyone have good lesson plans for geocaching clubs?

 

I have done an afterschool geocaching club for about 4 or 5 years. We meet once a week for 8 weeks. Usually we do a fall and spring session. Exactly how we do it varies from group to group. It is part of our 21st Century Learning Community. I hide 4-5 caches a week in a paved school yard. It is challenging. One thing the kids enjoy is a hide/mark and trade. One group hides a cache and marks the location on their GPSr and then trades units with another group who did the same thing in another part of the schoolyard. They love finding each other's caches and they all love trading swag.

[+FloridaFour 0]

Sounds fun. I'm looking around for ideas. I'm going to teach a geocaching class/field trip for Girl Scouts to earn their badge. I like the hide, mark, trade idea. Good practice, fun and no need to publish the caches.

[+markcase 0]

I took our science club on an after school field trip geocaching. Our science club meets the 2nd and 4th Monday after school. On the 2nd Monday we did a Geocaching 101 lesson. The 4th we went to downtown High Point and they used my GPS units and their smart phone apps. They worked in groups of 4 and went to find caches. After about an hour, we met back at the bus and went back to school. Most of them are hooked and go geocaching with their families now.