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The Great Escape of Ellen and William Craft Treasure hunt

First suggested by Black History Month
Take part in a treasure hunt to follow the Craft’s daring escape to freedom.

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You’ll need

  • A map of the hunt area (indoors or outdoors)
  • Envelopes with clue (each numbered)
William And Ellen Craft Treasure Hunt Clues
PDF – 982.4KB
Download William And Ellen Craft Treasure Hunt Clues

Before you begin

  • Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. There's also more guidance to help you carry out your risk assessment, including examples.   
  • Make sure all young people and adults involved in the activity know how to take part safely. 
  • Make sure you’ll have enough adult helpers. You may need some parents and carers to help. 

Planning and setting up this activity 

  • Print out and cut out the clues. You may wish to place them in envelopes.
  • You may want to have a set of clue for each group in different coloured envelopes, or you could have all groups follow the same clues.
  • You may want to take a photo of where you placed each clue, so you can remember where they all are.
  • You can run this treasure hunt in two ways:
  • You use the pictures and clues. You’ll need to hide each picture with the clue after it, so when people find the picture, they also find the next clue. For example, for the Clue 2 picture, you’ll need to hide it somewhere with Clue 3.
  • You can use the clues and objects. You can use the items for each clue, such as dressing up items for ‘Find something you can disguise yourself with’ and hide these around the space, along with the next clue. 

Running this activity

  1. Gather everyone together and tell everyone that you’re going to do a treasure hunt to follow the lives of Ellen and William Craft.  
  2. Explain that Ellen and William Craft were courageous African American freedom fighters who were born into slavery in Georgia, US. William faced a tough life. William’s first master apprenticed him as a carpenter, and auctioned him and the rest of his family off to different slaveholders to pay his debts. Ellen became a maid at a young age. When William and Ellen met in 1846, they fell in love and got married. However, they were worried about being separated, so they began to make a daring plan to escape from slavery and find their freedom together. 
  3. Ask everyone to get into pairs or small groups. Each team will work together to solve the clues. If they need to follow a certain colour envelope, make sure to tell groups which colour they are.
  4. You may want to start people off on the treasure hunt at different times or remind people to subtly find the clues, so lots of groups can do the treasure hunt at once.
  5. Let everyone do the treasure hunt. You may wish to reward the first team to complete the treasure hunt, or any teams who showed good teamwork, communication or kindness. 

Reflection

This activity was all about the amazing journey and inspiring work or Ellen and William Craft. Ask everyone if they can remember something about their journey. Now, see if anyone can think of why they think the Craft’s work was, and still is, important. Choose a few people to answer. 

Tell everyone that lots of people all around the world are still campaigning against racism and discrimination today. Racism is where someone treats another person differently because their skin colour is not the same as theirs, they speak a different language or have different religious beliefs, for example. 

All of us at Scouts want our world to be a place of peace and kindness, which means doing our bit to stand up and speak out against racism and being kind to everyone.  

Ask everyone how they think we can help learn about, prevent and report racism. Some ideas may include reporting any racism we hear or see; making sure not to judge people on their skin colour, what they wear or their beliefs; and making sure everyone is included and educating ourselves, such as learning about black history. 

Safety

All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.

You must run your activities in line with the Safeguarding Code of Conduct for Adults (Yellow Card) and report any concerns to the UK HQ Safeguarding Team.

Active games

The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.

Outdoor activities

You must have permission to use the location. Always check the weather forecast, and inform parents and carers of any change in venue.

  • To make this activity easier, you could let people be in bigger groups or have a young leader in each group.
  • To make it harder, you could write the clues in code for people to unscramble and solve. 

Make it accessible

All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.

Beavers Teamwork Challenge Award
Cubs Teamwork Challenge Award
Scouts Teamwork Challenge Award

If you enjoyed this activity, try our other activities for Black History Month.