Engage your Students with Escape Rooms in the Classroom

I don't know about you, but I am always looking for ways to switch up the regular day-to-day routine. The same old methods to introduce new skills, prep for tests, and review curriculum can get boring! One way you can mix it up is by doing an escape room with your class! Escape rooms in the classroom are not an everyday thing, so they are a great way to create student buy-in and engagement with the content you are teaching.

What are Escape Room Templates?

A typical escape room is a themed immersive adventure game where you are “locked” in a room with family or friends. To escape, you must complete the mission by solving a series of puzzles for the key. It is such a fun and popular trend right now, so why not bring it to the classroom?

In case you may be wondering, let me get this straight… no, these escape rooms do not involve locking any students in the classroom!😂

Escape room templates are the perfect way to bring the fun of escape rooms to your classroom. Escape room templates are:

• Completely Customizable
• Digtial or Printable
• Themed

The best part is that you can use these templates with ANY content!

Simply use the editable files to add your own questions, correct answers, and wrong answers for your students to work on and review content for your class.

Since you add your own content, the escape room templates are great for:

• Math
• Reading
• Spelling
• Grammar
• Vocabulary
• Science
• Social Studies

The options are not limited to just subjects either. You can even use the escape room templates to review expectations, introduce new skills, prep for tests, or even for fun. Use it for what YOU need in YOUR classroom!

How to Use

Students go through 4 unique stations with 3-4 questions each (your choice.) As students move through the station, they will record their answers on a recording sheet. At the end of the station, there is a decoder where they will solve a puzzle with the answers they recorded. If all of the answers are correct and input in the decoder correctly, students will “unlock” the next station. They will do this until they have completed the escape room.

Students can work independently, with a partner, or in a group.

When students complete the escape room, celebrate with the photo booth props included in the resources! Take a photo for the ClassGram bulletin board or the end-of-year memory book. If photos are not your thing, give out the swag tags to award all the hard work. Or you can even do both!

Foster Enagagement

Escape rooms would be a great activity when our classes are a little more active and chatty than usual. Try using the escape rooms during the holidays, for back to school, the end of the year, or any other time you need to foster a bit extra engagement.

Escape room templates are super versatile and can be used any time of year to add engagement to your routine!

Ways to Use

Use it in stations over a week. Students can just pick up where they left off on their slides or the task cards each day. They can track their progress on the recording sheet.

Have state testing or a big unit test coming up? Test review can get so boring, but it must be done! Engage your students in review with an escape room!

Escape rooms in the classroom can even be used in small groups! For example, have students work out math word problems together using different strategies, and they can unlock the station together when they find the solutions!

Project the escape room to the whole group and have table groups work together on dry erase boards to determine the correct answer. Set a timer, and when the time is up, have all groups hold up their answer choices. This would be a fun class competition to see if you can unlock the next station together!

Fostering engagement is essential for student buy-in! Escape rooms can be used anywhere you need them in your routine. Digital and printable options make it easy to use for everyone.

Digital

The digital version is on Google Slides, and it does have a little less prep involved than the printable version. The slides are linked and ready to customize to any content. All you need to do is input your own questions, correct answers, and wrong answers for your students to work on in the Slides. Below is a little clip of what the digital version looks like!

Printable

You can use the printable version's task cards to get your students up and moving around the room! This would be a great partner activity, and the final task could be a dance party or photo booth at the end! The printable version includes:

• Black & white and colored options
• Envelope covers and paper decoders
• Task cards

Emoji Escape Room FREEBIE

If escape rooms are something you want to try with your class, grab the Emoji Escape Room Template for free below!

What Teachers are Saying

Talk about ENGAGEMENT! My students LOVE the escape room activities and I love that they are so customizable so that no two escape rooms are the same. I can tie any review materials and/or curriculum to these and it is always an instant hit with my kids.” -Stephanie S.

“I bought this and literally used it right away for a math test review. The teacher instructions were clear and made it easy to create our very first escape room. This had everything we needed and was simple to prep. My students loved reviewing in this way and were so engaged! I can't wait for the other versions to come!” -Strategically Elementary

“I loved using this resource. The children were excited to go through the escape room. It took a little setting up, though all the hard work was already done. The children were totally engaged for the whole of the lesson, and it became the talk of the school. Now I constantly get asked when we are going to do another one.” -Alison C.

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