If you don’t already know, I am an early childhood education major and I’m currently student teaching in a third grade classroom. I love my school and I love my students, and over the course of this semester, I’m immensely proud of a lot of things I have accomplished; most of all, though, I’m proud of the relationships I’ve developed with my students. I have learned about each of their interests, strengths, weaknesses, and experiences, and I know their personalities well.
Last week, our math class finished chapter 7 on Tuesday, took a hard unit test on Wednesday, and had to take a Benchmark test on Thursday. We thought they deserved to have some fun before going back to regular math to start chapter 8, and decided to plan an escape room for them.
There is a company called BreakoutEDU, which creates escape room-like activities and sends boxes with multiple different locks to classrooms. My mentor teacher had these boxes and locks, but the actual activities are pricy, so we decided against using any of their pre-made ones. We found some fact family challenge questions and an escape room activity online and decided to use parts of it.
Using some of the aspects of the online activity and some sections that I created (and 45 stressful minutes of set-up while the kids were at special), we were ready! The students came in and were confused when we told them that we weren’t doing our normal groups and that they shouldn’t touch anything that seemed unusual. Once everyone was settled in, I asked how many of them had ever done an escape room. The reactions were immediate! Hands shot up and everyone started chatting excitedly. I displayed a picture with a description of the escape room: a mad mathematician had trapped them in math class. We split the class into four groups, and they had to work as a team to solve the fact family questions and follow the hints to the next station. There were codes involved and technology integration on computers, and it was some of the best teamwork I had ever seen (of any age group!).
At the end, each group was given a more challenging multiplication problem. All four of the teams had to put their answers together in order to decipher the final code, which was put into an actual lock that was keeping a box closed. I picked a student to come unlock the box, and everyone else was so excited that they couldn’t keep still. Inside the box were monkey head erasers to go on the top of their pencils – super random, but the real joy was how proud of themselves the students were.
The thing that I was the most impressed with was my students’ collaboration. In 4 groups with 5 or 6 third graders in each group, there was not a single student who sat back and let their teammates do the work for them or didn’t pay attention. They were super impressive and I couldn’t be prouder.
This was something that my students had a great time with, and so did I! There was a lot of planning and preparation, but it was totally worth it. It’s something that I can’t wait to do again!
If you’re interested in doing an escape room with your students but also a little apprehensive about it, don’t let your nerves get the best of you. Make sure that your students know your expectations of their behavior and motivate them to do well, and you’ll be pleasantly shocked by what they are capable of.
HCXO, Lola
Images courtesy of Google Images and Lola Itzhaki