Old Town, Alexandria is full of history, and there is no better way to make history fun for kids than with up close, in person exploration. A self guided walking tour of Old Town may sound like a grownup thing, but you can get a kid-friendly version from Alexandria Colonial Tours. (Cost is currently $4.00 for each Kids Scavenger Hunt Map, but please check the website when you plan your outing. 2021 update: this version is no longer listed on the Colonial Tours website, but reference to it with the Christmas Attic location is still up on the Alexandria City website… maybe print the free version listed below as your plan “B” in case things change.) You pick up your map at the Christmas Attic, located at 125 S. Union Street. There are two versions- George Washington and John Carlyle. We did George Washington. (Ian spent a lot of time debating whether we were likely to find any of good ol’ George’s lost belongings and/or his bones at any point on our trip. Hmm. We’ll see…) Self guided tours are actually a perfect activity with kids, because if they are tired or bored or otherwise need to go home in the middle, you can come back another day and start right where you left off. You aren’t missing anything!
There is also a free PDF version of a historic walking tour available here. The free version has many more stops than the kids’ version, but you could definitely just edit it down to fewer stops to suit the attention (and walking) abilities of a younger participant.
The description of the tour says it will take “about 45 minutes.” The lowdown on that is that there are six stops on your self-guided tour. How long that takes will depend on how fast you walk and how busy King Street happens to be when you do it. We actually made a few detours. It’s hard to get a stroller through weekend pedestrian traffic on King Street without jostling folks. Fortunately, in addition to the written directions in the clues (head two blocks west…) there is also a map printed on the back of the scavenger hunt page. So the kiddo and I would pinpoint our destination, and then we would navigate our way there by the map. (Once again preparing my kids for a world in which they may find themselves transported through time. Today we are preparing for a trip to a time when there is no GPS.)
The tour is recommended for ages 8-11. If you want the kid to read the clues, plan the path to the next stop, find the relevent information, and fill in the blanks without help and just go along for the ride, that might be accurate. But this tour is fun for younger kids if you are prepared to help a little, and also consider adding a stop in the middle for food or something else that breaks it up a little.
In our case, my kid is not quite six. He was not equally interested in all six of the stops. (The ice well, which is currently under construction, threatened to derail the whole trip when I thought we might not be able to tear him away.) There is no denying that he was way more into the cobblestone paving we saw on our way back to the car than he was the trajectory of Mr. Fitzgerald’s military and political careers, but the point is that he enjoyed himself. He had ice cream and retraced George Washington’s steps. And we were outside on a sunny spring day while he held my hand and asked questions. If this is what he comes to think of as a “history lesson,” then I think that’s not bad for a $4 investment in teaching my kid to understand and respect the past. So stop by the Christmas Attic on the next nice day and grab one of these maps to use with your family. You might bump into us doing the Carlyle tour.
One Comment on “History for Wiggleworms: Kids Scavenger Hunt in Old Town Alexandria”