Tanner Elementary Principal Angie Barnes helps third-grader Sandra Nolasco determine if she has collected all the eggs on her list during a scavenger hunt Friday.

The sloppy weather could not keep Tanner Elementary students from having an epic scavenger hunt in the school’s cafeteria last Friday.

Armed with a list that required them to find plastic eggs labeled with nouns, verbs, sums and adjectives, third-grade students crawled under tables and peeked behind equipment to find eggs that fit the requirements of their list.

It only took third-grader Shaun McPherson about 10 minutes to find all six of his eggs. The budding artist, who sculpts dinosaurs out of clay in his free time, said the whole thing was pretty easy.

“I pretty much knew what everything was on my list, except for adjectives,” he said. “Today I figured out what an adjective was.”

Jada Hines, on the other hand, found the hunt to be challenging, mostly because her fellow classmates kept accidentally kicking around the eggs she needed to complete her list.

Once students found the six eggs on their list, they got to pop them open and enjoy the candy hidden inside.

Originally scheduled to take place outside, third-grade teacher Jessica Kent came up with the plastic egg scavenger hunt to prepare kids for upcoming performance tests.

“It’s an academic review of math and grammar done in a fun way,” she said. “It sure beats sitting at a desk doing worksheets.”

The school’s principal, Angie Barnes, was also on hand. She helped third-grader Sandra Nolasco figure out a math problem while also helping another student sort through her eggs to make sure she had found all of the appropriate ones.

“Students are engaging as they are learning, which helps them remember the concepts so much better,” Barnes said. “Plus, activities like this are a great check for our teachers to see what they need to spend more time on.”

All four of the third-grade teachers at Tanner Elementary participated in the hunt.

Aside from sharpening her students’ reading and math skills, Kent said the activity pushed them to work through problems to solve them.

“We’re so used to things in life being quick and automatic,” she said. “But this really made them slow down and really think about what they were trying to accomplish.”

“Plus, it was fun,” she added. “We can have a good time while learning. They deserve to have a good time sometimes.”