Fast forward six years. I am now in my seventh year of teaching, and I have experienced failure after failure, but I am finally beginning to experience triumph! I am always looking for the newest teaching strategies, and one I came upon last year is the Escape Room. I tried it, and my classes have transformed into what I envisioned back in 2012.
Escape Rooms are rapidly growing in popularity across the country, and whoever decided to make it work in the classroom is a genius. The concept of an Escape Room is simple. You are given a situation and have to follow clues, put together puzzles, decode messages, etc. to escape the situation. You can take any material or mundane worksheet and turn it into an engaging Escape Room.
The results in my classroom have been astounding. Students who previously did nothing in class (you know that kid) are now reading, writing, thinking critically, and participating. THEY ARE ENGAGED, and it's a dream come true! I also flip the classroom in many of the Escape Rooms and make students accountable for their own learning.
I decided to use Escape Rooms frequently this year and made it into a semester- or year-long (depending on the class and how your year is structures) competition. Students pick their groups and stay with that group for the entire semester. At the beginning of each Escape Room, one member from each group brings me their phone with their stopwatch open. When I say go, they start their clock and begin. At the end, they stop their clock and I write down their time. I add up all times after each Escape Room and keep a running leader board. At the end of the semester, the three groups with the lowest overall times get a pizza party, and the overall winner also gets t-shirts. This provides a constant incentive to do their best work and not slack off. They get really competitive and have a ton of fun with it!
Begin by deciding what you want to teach. Then, break it into categories. For example, in one escape room, students focus on symbolism, irony, and theme in "The Story of an Hour" and "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Escape Room is broken into sections. I begin by passing out Part 1 and the worksheet, chart, or whatever students are completing. Students will have a task to complete in Part 1. In the previously mentioned example, I provided students with an explanation of irony with examples. Sometimes, I include videos of me demonstrating a skill as well. They had to read the information and fill in the appropriate sections of their worksheet. At the bottom of Part 1, there is a clue that hints at the location of Part 2. This is where it gets fun. You can simply hide things, give them a lock combination, use invisible ink and a black light, etc., or you can use the clues to review a skill that you are working on. For example, one clue I have used is to tell me the first, second, third, etc. part of an argumentative paragraph. It is best to give every group different clues. If you don't they just follow group ahead of them and 1st block tells 2nd block the clues. The rest of the Escape Room follows the same format as Part 1.
I strongly suggest trying this out. It takes a lot of time and planning, but it's so worth it! Let me know how it goes!
I have several Escape Rooms in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. You can find them here: teacherspayteachers.com/store/teach-a-little-kinder
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