Jennifer Chambers The Detroit News Published 11:27 PM EST Nov 9, 2018 Belleville — Gabrielle Johnson’s sixth-grade students are not half asleep at desks or mindlessly staring at the clock. They are on their feet trying to break out of class. Johnson has set up an escape room inside Owen Intermediate School as part of a lesson in English language arts that focuses on idioms, those phrases that don’t mean exactly what they say. Borrowing ideas from adult versions of the game, escape rooms are an increasingly popular style of K-12 teaching that educators say offer a creative way to get students engaged with material and excited about problem-solving. They include the classic game components — teamwork, clues and prizes — with an educational twist aligned to traditional classroom lessons and curriculum standards. Johnson and the school staff created the escape room from scratch, spending hours transforming an empty classroom into a colorful Willy Wonka candy factory where teams of students hunt for idiom clues at candy-enhanced stations around the room. They must use the information to win their way out of the game in a limited amount of time. “Your goal is to get out of this Candyland. You have to answer questions on story structure, setting, the climax, the rising action. You will answer those as a team,” Johnson told her students. Armed with instructions, students excitedly took off in teams and ran to stations around the room, moving quickly to open jars of pretend candy, look underneath boxes of treats and through candy-colored bottles of fluid to find the phrases such as “It’s raining… [Read full story]
Leave a Reply