Christmas Escape Room

Last Monday December 17 2018, we started celebrating Christmas at the school library, helping Santa out of his trouble with this Christmas gift delivery, through a brief and easy escape room, which gathered A1 - B1 ESL students around cracking codes for an hour.

The students were teamed up out of the library, on the ground floor, by receiving a Christmas tree card each. There were blue, green, orange, yellow, purple and red Christmas tree cards, so as to make teams of multilevel students.

You only need to print as many sets of cards as students you would like to team up, cut them according to colours, and give them out to them as they queue to get into the escape room.

That way, when they start the escape room games they already belong to a team and can work together more smoothly.

 

Next, the school library door is locked and students are told about Santa's trouble and his need for their help, as well as how they can help Santa out, together with the game straightforward instructions: in order to escape the room, they will have to crack some codes, and Santa will then thank them by allowing them out. Christmas will be then safe!

It is quite a cheap simple escape room to build, and the only material you need is several envelopes in various colours for the printed photocopiable clues and the codes, decide on the puzzles to solve in order to crack each code, some Christmas candy to warm the game up, a prize for the winning team and lots of Christmas mood, of course!

Here you are some pictures of what happened in our school library Christmas escape room, where every team worked hard and fast to be the first to crack every code, although of course, there can only be one winner, and that was the Orange Christmas Tree Team! But all interacted in English, which is essential, understood the puzzles they were faced with, and collaborated, which were some of the goals to be achieved, apart from having a wonderful time.

I would like to thank the other ESL teacher from the school, who came with her B1 students and took part in the escape room, for her interest, and of course my bunch of A1 superb ESL students, who are always ready to jump into any learning adventure with me.

And last but not least, I gratefully acknowledge Sarah's STEM Stuff from Teachers pay Teachers, for her awesome ideas, which I have remixed in this first school library escape room of the year!