First Day Of School Escape Room

Hello!

I have officially been with students for three days! I can already tell I have a great group and I'm very excited for this year. 

I wanted to start the year off with a bang, but it's hard to do that when teaching procedures, rules, disclosure/syllabus stuff etc. In years past I have gone over all my rules with a powerpoint and it's  been excruciating for everyone involved.

My fabulous PLC member found an escape room on TPT and we each bought it and decided to try it out. It was SO awesome! Students were super engaged and I  have never seen them going over a syllabus so carefully in their entire lives.  

There are four tasks included in the escape room, students get a key word with each task and that is how they move on to the next task. The first one is a getting to know you game where students have to make BINGO with things they did over the summer. 

Then they do a supply scavenger hunt where they are given different riddles and they have to find places in the room where those supplies are kept. Each spot has a letter and they eventually find all the letters to come up with a word.

The third task is a syllabus close read, and the fourth task is a cryptogram with growth mindset quotes.

We had to tweak the escape room a little bit to fit our needs and then we had to come up with some rules to help students actually get the content of the different activities instead of just skipping ahead to the end where they got their key word. For example, I really made a point in telling them to be careful about their voice volume because they don't want other teams to hear their work. All this group work and it was a super quiet room! I also required that the students decode all the growth mindset quotes instead of just the underlined parts that gave them the key word, that way they would actually understand the quotes. 

It was a great activity, students understood everything that they should on disclosure day and they loved doing something different.

You can purchase this Back to School Escape Room from Nouvelle ELA! Thanks to her for all the work that went into it!