Letterboxing in the Classroom

Have any of you ever done a letterboxing project in your classroom or library? I think it could be a really cool, educationally sound, cross-curricular project, but I wanted some advice from someone who had already done it. Any ideas for me?

Tags: letterboxing

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Permalink Reply by Grace Gorman on November 4, 2009 at 2:00pm

What is letterboxing?

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Permalink Reply by Megan Siemens on November 5, 2009 at 7:46am

Letterboxing is like a scavenger hunt. As a hobby, people hide "letterboxes," which are waterproof containers that contain a rubber stamp and a notebook, out in nature somewhere. Then they post clues leading to the letterbox online (at www.letterboxing.org or www.atlasquest.com), and people like you and me take our own rubber stamp, our own notebook, and our own inkpad on a quest to find them. When we find the box, we use their stamp to stamp our notebooks and our stamp to stamp theirs. Then we go back to the website and record our find.

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Permalink Reply by Rob Culp on November 5, 2009 at 8:25am

I have never done letterboxing, but I have done geocaching, (www.geocaching.com) which is very similar. With Geocaching you need a GPS. A handheld GPS gives you your exact latitude and longitude. There's a video about how to do it on their site. It's a lot of fun. I don't know how it compares to letterboxing, but here are some suggestions to make it cross-curricular.

-Latitude and longitude (since that is what you are using to find the location)
-Decimals (you can get a coordinate and make a math problem out of it instead of just giving them the coordinates)
-Science (depending on the location you are going to you can teach about the outdoors)
-Language Arts (you can read blogs about people geocaching, have students write about their experience, and/or you can even have them write instructions for how to get to the geocache)

Hope this helps you some or gives you some ideas for how to use letterboxing.