Digital Escape Rooms - Ms. Cotton's Corner

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Best Selling Digital Escape Room

Posted on December 7, 2023 by scotton23 Leave a comment

digital Escape Room - Holidays Around the World

Update: This Digital Escape Room giveaway has ended, but you can still grab this digital Escape Room on TPT. Be sure to follow MsCottonsCorner.com so you never miss a FLASH FREEBIE again!

This Digital Escape Room is my best seller for a reason! Students love the variety of winter tales from around the world, and teachers love how easy it is to use, and how engaged and focused the students are! In the middle of December, that’s a gift for any teacher! And it is FREE today!

Digital Escape Room - Winter Tales from Around the World

This easy to use digital escape room gives students practice with fiction and non-fiction reading comprehension. It includes stories and articles about Christmas traditions in many parts of the world, and also Hanukkah and other winter celebrations. Click here to grab it now!

This is part of my 12 Days of Giveaways in December. Want to get more freebies? Follow me so you don’t miss a single one! Just click the black button to the right, and the blog posts will be delivered to your inbox. Or, find Ms. Cotton’s Corner on Instagram – the daily freebies will be posted in both locations!

Do your teacher friends like free resources? Be sure to forward this to them – they deserve free resources too!

What is Included in this Digital Escape Room?

The adventure begins with a mysterious book – that includes this Table of Contents. Each of these stories are embedded in the Escape Room, along with non-fiction texts about Christmas in Australia and Hanukkah. Please note, the page numbers do NOT correspond to the Digital Escape Room, which includes 19 Sections of text, riddles, puzzles and comprehension questions.

The resource also includes supports to help you assign the Google Form and optional printables that can be useful as your students solve the Digital Escape Room.

This adventure allows students to make decisions. Each decision leads them down a new path, so they may not read each text – it all depends on the decisions they make! Students are generally so motivated by this type of choice that they want to go through the Escape Room more than once!

Want to know more? Check out this video preview and see for yourself!

Why Use Digital Escape Rooms?

Digital Escape Rooms can be a terrific format for exposing students to a lot of text – both fiction and non-fiction. They are highly motivated to read so that they can solve the riddles and puzzles and make it through the adventure! This Escape Room includes both fiction and non-fiction. A fictional story runs through the adventure, and students encounter the fiction stories, non-fiction texts about Hanukkah and Christmas in Australia, and plenty of riddles, puzzles and comprehension questions.

In addition to motivating students, Digital Escape Rooms are such a time-saver for teachers! There is no prep for you, and you also get data about how your students did – without grading papers! I hate grading papers, so that’s a real plus in my book! For more about why Digital Escape Rooms are awesome for intermediate students, check out this blog post.

Need help and suggestions for assigning Google Forms? Check out this blog post for tips and supports.

What are Teachers Saying about this Digital Escape Room?

“This was awesome! I had the kids working together to solve and they were completely engaged. This was challenging, but not so difficult that they couldn’t do it.”
-Becky D.

“This was the perfect way to spend time before Christmas vacation started. Students were engaged and focused, hard to do that time of year.”
-Wendy C.

“My class loved this resource! They were definitely engaged and wanted to keep reading the whole time–a feat that is not easy with a whole class!! Would definitely recommend!”
-Nicole M.

Click here to grab it now!

Love this Digital Escape Room? Check these ones out!

Click to check out these resources and more in my TPT store!

Make sure you don’t miss a single FREEBIE this December! Follow this blog by clicking the black button to the right, and follow me on Instagram and TPT too! While you’re at it, forward this post to your teacher friends and share the love. Everyone deserves free resources this December!

I hope this Digital Escape Room, and the 11 other free resources I’m giving away in December help you have a wonderful holiday season, and your students too. Happy teaching!

Susan

Using Google Forms Escape Rooms

Posted on March 20, 2021 by scotton23 One comment

In the past year and a half, I have grown to love Google Forms. They are so versatile – you can include text, videos, photos… There are tons of different ways to ask questions, and they save me time because they are self-grading. What’s not to love? I use them for all the time. For more information on how to use them, be sure to check out this blog post.

Why digital instead of physical?

One of the things I most enjoy creating with Google Forms is Escape Rooms. I used paper Escape Rooms in my classroom before discovering the digital version, and I will never go back! Escape Rooms are so fun and engaging for kids – they forget they are learning! The key advantage of Google Form Escape Rooms is no prep. With the paper version, you have to print, cut, laminate, assemble, distribute…. You get the idea. Once a digital Escape Room is created, there is NO PREP! Just assign it through your Google Classroom, put the kids in groups, and away they go! For more about assigning Google Forms in Google Classroom, check out this blog post.

Escape Rooms teach content

Of course, an Escape Room is only as good as its content. My bestseller, Escape from the Lab uses texts and videos to teach students about the states of matter and to increase their comprehension skills of non-fiction text. It is a straightforward Escape Room that includes all of the information that students need to escape. Each section has a new lock, and the answers to the questions give students the code. I labeled this Escape Room B for Beginner because students do not need to solve difficult riddles and crack codes to be successful. Use this type of Escape Room if you haven’t done them with your students before or if you want the focus to be only content, and not include the extra layer of codes and ciphers. If students get the right answers to the questions, they will also have the codes and solutions for the riddles. These Escape Rooms are a similar challenge level – the content is on grade level, the codes are simple and all the information is clearly presented to the students

Escape from Santa’s Workshop – a Decimal Escape Room
Escape from the Sun – an Order of Operations Escape Room
The Pet Nabber – an Escape Room type adventure about Number Sense

If your students are more experienced with Escape Rooms, I just finished creating Escape from Ireland, an adventure about the stories of Ireland. It’s perfect for St. Patrick’s day! The focus is on reading comprehension, so students read embedded texts and answer questions about them. The Escape Room includes a biography of St. Patrick that you can download for free on TPT! It also includes a retelling of the Legend of Finn MacCool, a fictional story about the Leprechaun King and 3 short descriptions of famous castles in Ireland. When you put those texts together with the storyline of the Escape Room, kids will be doing a lot of reading! The codes and riddles require some background knowledge, so this is rated I for Intermediate. I have filled this Escape Room with high quality photographs of Ireland, interesting texts and opportunities for critical thinking and problem solving. Plus, there are leprechauns and magic! What’s not to love!

You Decide Escape Rooms

Another type of Escape Room adventure is the choose your own adventure style. This is by far the most complicated type of Escape Room to create. It is not straightforward because the students make decisions during the activity, and each decision leads down a different path. These are incredibly engaging for for the kids, and I find that they play them over and over because they can have a different outcome each time! Escape from Plymouth Colony and Adventure in the Chocolate Factory are both this type of Escape Room.

Summary

Escape Rooms are versatile and easy to use, and kids love them! The varied formats, videos, texts, images, and adventure will hook them, and you will love the content and important strategies and skills that students can practice. Check out these digital Escape Rooms today and give one a try in your classroom. You will be glad you did!

Resources

Launching the virtual Classroom – Escape Room!

Posted on September 14, 2020 by scotton23 One comment

So, week one of virtual instruction in in the books. We are doing a soft start so it’s more like Day One is in the books! Even though I’m not with my kids in person, I still have the same goals for the first day – launch academics, make connections and surprise them so they want to come back for more! Be sure to check out how I do that in person with this blog post. Here is how I accomplished that virtually.

I wanted to really catch the students’ attention right away and launch some academics. I also wanted to surprise them. So, I decided to start with a digital Escape Room through the year (click the link to get a copy of the Escape Room I created. Edit and use it if you would like to!). Escape Rooms are so engaging because the story carries students through an adventure. The codes and puzzles bring a level of mystery and challenge that is also very engaging.

I created a story line that gave students a preview of the content we are going to study together. That helped accomplish my goal to launch academics. I decided to use Google Slides instead of Forms because I wanted to get the kids used to working with Slides because we will use them a lot in our virtual classroom . I structured the Escape Room with some of the codes that we will use in other Escape Rooms so that I could introduce them as well.

Here are a few of the slides in the Escape Room. You can download your own copy and modify it to fit your content! And if you like this type of activity, be sure to check out some of the digital Escape Rooms I have on TPT!

As we worked through the first challenge together, I was able to reinforce the content we will be learning and also begin to build connections with the kiddos. For the second code, I sent them to breakout rooms. We will use the same breakout groups for several weeks. This was their first time in the groups, and working on the second code helped them begin to get to know each other. We will build those connections over the next weeks with more opportunities to work with the same group.

For homework, each student clicked on one of the links to watch a video or read an article. Then they left a comment on the Graffiti Wall. That gave them practice with inserting a text box – an essential skill that they will use a lot this year and also gave me insights into what they are looking forward to.

This activity worked so well that I will use it again next year! The kids were definitely hooked and I accomplished my three goals – we launched academics, built connections, and did something surprising!

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