Escape rooms are all the rage these days. As a fun group activity, an escape room is exciting, and thrilling, and tests those investigative skills. If you aren’t familiar with it, an escape room is when a group of people are essentially “locked” into a room for fun. They must solve a series of puzzles and clues and accomplish goals within a time constraint to obtain the key to “unlock” the room. Instead of going bowling or going to an arcade, an escape room is the newest FUN adrenaline-pumping activity to do.
An escape room’s general purposes and goals can easily be transferred to the classroom. That same exhilarating feeling can be felt by your students as they review and learn new concepts. Students think they’re playing a game, but all the while, they’re learning. It’s practice and assessment in disguise!
If you’ve ever been like me, a classroom escape room may have intimidated you. I purchased a few on Teachers Pay Teachers to complete with my students, and then I made a couple myself to use in the classroom based on the general procedure of other ones. Escape rooms don’t have to be intimidating at all. I’m here to tell you how to create your escape room for any standard and subject in your classroom.
Benefits of a Classroom Escape Room
Not only are escape rooms fun opportunities to review and practice skills, but they also have a plethora of advantages. Escape rooms require students to collaborate and work together to achieve a common goal. Communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills are built. Students think critically to decipher clues, unscramble codes, and make connections. Escape rooms are also engaging and fun. Sure, you could give students a packet of worksheets to review a unit, but by creating an escape room, the same skills are reviewed but in a much more motivating way. Escape rooms also teach time management skills as students race against the clock and each other to complete tasks and achieve a common goal. Lastly, an escape room’s immersive and hands-on nature helps drastically with memory retention.
How to Create an Escape Room
1. Decide What You Will be Using it For
Is this an escape room in which you’ll be reviewing differing concepts, assessing knowledge, or teaching new skills? Escape rooms are easily customizable. Escape rooms can provide a multi-faceted and dynamic approach to teaching key concepts. Whatever it may be that you’re teaching or reviewing, develop the challenges the students will be completing FIRST.
For example, when creating an escape room based on reviewing a novel unit, I knew I wanted to review the spelling words, vocabulary, comprehension questions, and inferring skills we had been practicing. That meant I had four concepts and would need four challenges for students to complete.
2. Keep it Simple
Next, I developed the challenges and kept them simple, but with a fun twist. With the spelling challenge, I scrambled the spelling words and students had to unscramble them and spell them correctly. For vocabulary, students had to complete a crossword puzzle I quickly made on discoveryeducation.com. As far as comprehension questions, students had to answer the multiple choice questions but each answer (A, B, C, D, or E) led to a special code word that had to be solved to move on to the next challenge. For inferring skills, I did a simple inference worksheet related to our novel.
Anagrams and riddles are some challenges that work well in escape rooms. Deciphering timelines, Sudoku, and even word searches are other fun challenge options. Decoding quotes from a novel or piecing together a plot line are all challenges I’ve incorporated as well.
An escape room can be thought of as a station or center, but with a fun twist. The concept of students competing against each other to see who “escapes” or finishes first helps motivate students to focus and work diligently.
3. Connect it to an Escape Concept
Now that your challenges are finished, connect it all to form an escape concept. For instance, maybe they are helping a main character from a novel “escape” a situation, such as a haunted house. Perhaps, if it’s a history escape room, students are working to help a soldier “escape” a battle. Or, it could connect in a fun way such as the student is racing against the clock to find “buried treasure” and they must complete the math stations and each challenging task to uncover the treasure map to find the treasure chest in their classroom.
Bring the excitement of a summer carnival to your classroom and help your students “escape” to summer break with this engaging and educational Summer Carnival Escape Room! Perfect for an end-of-year language arts review, students will have a blast as they tackle six carnival-themed tasks designed to reinforce key language arts skills and help them escape to summer break! Grab yours today!
Once you’ve figured out the escape concept, you can create student directions and even add more elements such as special code words or clues that need to be solved along with each challenge. The main part, however, is to keep it simple and not too difficult. I’ve seen students become frustrated when there are too many codes to figure out or the questions are too hard. It doesn’t become fun anymore, so make sure to keep your escape room at a developmentally appropriate level.
4. Guidelines
When implementing an escape room, it’s important to think through how you want it to run. After a student finishes a challenge, do they come up to you, the teacher, and find out if it’s correct and then are given the next challenge? Perhaps your challenges are self-checking and the student automatically moves to the next challenge. Whatever way you expect to run the escape room, make sure the students explicitly know the guidelines. They will be excited, so they might not fully listen to the procedures, so try to keep it simple as well.
I have found it most successful to keep the answers myself to each challenge and students run to me to check their answers before receiving the next challenge. Another way is that each challenge requires a code word that relates to the questions and they just have to show me the code word before they receive the next challenge.
Too Busy to Create an Escape Room? Find one!
The holidays are a wonderful time to try out an escape room in your classroom. December can be a month in which it’s all chaos, but channel that chaos into a productive and fun escape room. We all know December is an exhausting month, so if you’re strapped for time, there are plenty of pre-made escape rooms out there. We have one literary escape room perfect for the elementary and young middle grades classroom!
Dasher by Matt Tavares, a New York Times bestseller, is a wonderful Christmas picture book! Our escape room, Dasher’s Daring Escape, is a fun and exciting challenge that incorporates six ELA tasks for students to complete to help Dasher rescue her family of reindeer, escape the circus, and make it to the North Pole! The tasks cover:
-Grammar
-Figurative Language
-Spelling
-Vocabulary & Poetry
-Nonfiction Reading Comprehension
Just the right mix of fun and academics for December!
Grab Dasher by Matt Tavares here:
Conclusion:
If you haven’t tried escape rooms in the classroom, we encourage you to dive in! Keep them simple and fun. An escape room will transform your classroom into an immersive and hands-on learning environment. Escape rooms are effective, engaging, exciting, and educational. Embrace the adventure of an escape room and watch your students’ love of learning soar.
