Have a little fun this spring with standards-aligned escape rooms!
Easter is one of the last holidays we’ll celebrate in the classroom this year.
Since it falls on Sunday, Easter is a holiday that often gets overlooked in the classroom, even though there are so many fun ways to incorporate it into our learning.
Personally, we love the Easter season here at The Sparkly Notebook. The colors are bright and vibrant (which we LOVE), the candy is unique and delicious, and the whole tone of Easter is bright and cheery… a direct contrast to the winter season we just trudged through.
It is no surprise then that we would try to bring some of that cheer and those bright colors into the classroom to kick off the spring season.
One of our favorite ways to celebrate this spring holiday is with standards-aligned escape rooms.
We love using this Easter Digital Escape Room or this Spring Digital Escape Room because they are self-checking, Easter/Spring-themed, and standards-aligned (This part is an absolute must in our book!!!)
To ensure your students meet the standards, you must have a plan. This plan includes breaking down the standards, making a plan for how you will teach, spiral, and review the skills covered in each standard, and then finding good resources and lessons that help achieve that goal.
We talk more about ensuring your students are mastering the standards in this blog post.
These digital escape rooms are some of our go-to activities for spiraling standards throughout the year, and these spring-themed escape rooms give us two different opportunities to do just that!
Often escape rooms are designed to be puzzles, riddles, and challenges. But the puzzles can’t be the only focus of the room!
In many of the escape rooms we’ve found, students may learn a little piece of information from reading and decoding clues from an informational passage, but outside of general problem-solving and decoding, they aren’t actually practicing any ELA skills.
That is why we’ve created our Easter Digital Escape Room and Spring Digital Escape Room … to require students to use their skills to conquer the escape room.
This Easter Escape Room is all about figurative language.
In order to successfully escape, students will need to think critically about the 7 figurative language types that we typically focus on in middle school ELA.
Over the course of 5 challenges, students will interact with different examples of figurative language several times.
If you aren’t interested in giving the escape room a whole class day to complete, you can also introduce it one challenge at a time using the printable version of the room.
This will allow your students to do different tasks each day!
If you are looking for another standards-aligned escape room to use during the Easter season or even later into the spring, you can also explore this Spring-Themed Escape Room that focuses on reading comprehension skills. In this standards-aligned escape room, students will work on order and sequence, answer reading comprehension questions, and complete a task requiring them to organize events on a plotline.
The Easter season can be fun, but as with every holiday, there are ways to celebrate while staying focused on our educational goals.
That is why these standards-aligned escape rooms are always part of our curricular plans for the Spring!
