Escape rooms, often called breakout challenges, are popular. Thus, classroom escape rooms are increasingly appearing in schools worldwide. Escape room puzzles are fun for pupils! They’re engaging and teach 21st-century skills like critical thinking, communication, and cooperation. Classroom escape room tasks have many uses. Escape rooms are entertaining and difficult ways for students to learn and review, but they take time and money to make. This post will teach you how to make a simple, affordable kids escape room that your children will adore!
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Ways For Creating an Escape Room
Every school escape room needs an engaging theme and a time restriction to challenge pupils. Each of my social studies escape rooms has a time-travel theme. I tell pupils they’re going back in time to study about a period. Students are told they have limited time to accomplish the assignment. If they fail to finish the task in time, the time machine will malfunction, and the class cannot return to the future. The subject and time constraints engage students and drive them to solve problems to finish the challenge.
Start Creating Your Classroom Escape Room:
1. Determine learning goals.
First, decide what you want pupils to learn. This might be 2-digit addition, careful reading, or material qualities. Endless possibilities! Escape rooms may be made for almost any teaching goal.
2. Choose a school escape room theme.
This is fun! Escape room themes might be seasonal, like Halloween, Christmas, or summer, or year-round, like space, detectives, dinosaurs, or treasure maps. You could even use a class novel. Roman or mediaeval castles might provide inspiration.
3. Scene-setting
After choosing a topic, choose the pupils’ ultimate aim. This may be an ‘escape’ or you could violate the rules! Departing from a haunted home, locating riches, or fixing Santa’s sleigh and departing the North Pole on Christmas Eve are possible goals. After choosing your aim, establish the scenario. Give the pupils a letter explaining the problem and how to fix it. Even a character could write this. Santa may write to pupils, saying his sleigh is damaged and needs their aid to deliver presents on Christmas Eve. Playing with a movie instead of a letter is possible.
4. Choose your escape room layout.
You may arrange your escape room however you like, but I like to have one clue linked to the next. This may be a bookcase or a tap from the classroom. I adore displaying theme-related posters throughout the room. I might use cauldron or spider web posters for a spooky house. To demonstrate where the next clue may be. Scavenger-hunt escape rooms are enjoyable because students walk to the site and find the next clue in an envelope, but this is optional. You may provide the clues to the students when they respond correctly. Try my classroom escape room clue organisation tips on my blog. I also recommend 4-5-person teams for pupils. They can work together, exploit team members’ strengths, and improve teamwork. You may even give clue reader, clue collector, response recorder, etc. roles to team members.
5. Time it.
Set a timer for added difficulty. This encourages challenge completion. A white board with an interactive feature might display this. Give pupils countdown reminders, such as 30 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. Give pupils more time than you think they’ll need the first time you undertake an escape room for kids birthday to ensure everyone succeeds.
Conclusion
Escape rooms are an excellent opportunity to review curriculum and practice 21st-century skills in the classroom. Some teachers avoid DIY escape rooms owing to time and cost. Not all classroom escape rooms are costly or time-consuming. Using a colourful theme, interesting riddles, and technology, you can construct a cheap and quick classroom escape room. The best part is that escape room classroom activities get pupils enthusiastic to study!
