Escape Room Madness

Can you escape the grasp of 207's escape room? Who knows?
Usually we would've done a haunted house or a halloween poem presentation, but since Tiiu had done a haunted house for 10 years straight, we decided to do an escape room instead. Now this really all started with Shauna Pollock, a former teacher of Churchill. Tiiu had been telling us a story about how she and Shauna had gone to an escape room a little while back. She told us that she had a fantastic idea to do an escape room instead of a haunted house. Oh boy, it really was a fantastic idea, no doubt about it.
The first step we needed to take was to figure out what the challenges were going to be. That order of business was hard! Before we began, Tiiu set up some challenges for us to try. Then we brainstormed and came up with what we were going to use. We used some ideas from those first challenges and also came up with some new ones.


Here are some of the ideas we used:

• a math tile puzzle game (Marcy Cooke tiles)
• a clock that had hands pointing at lock combination numbers
• we had students find numbers stuck to bricks of Legos in big bins for another lock combination
• a page with holes in it that, when placed over a page in a book showed a word clue

We spent almost one entire day building props and preparing. We made different teams that did different jobs.
After that we made some changes, experimented our escape room on people, and did some more brainstorming. We also tweeted with a local escape room that gave us some advice.
Finally the escape room was finished!
The story behind it was that you were with your class on a field trip in a museum when you wandered away from your class. Then the museum closed for the night and you were still in the museum and had to get out. We created five different museum exhibits (a museum of nature, an art gallery, a museum of ancient civilizations, and a science museum). Each exhibit had the exact same series of problems. This meant that classes could all come down together but small groups of 4-5 students could work on the problems. The escape room basically had all the puzzles in it, some museum artifact decorations, and some pretty funny "portraits" that people stuck their heads in so they could give clues. One team of people wrote a series of clues that rhymed. Each room also had someone from our class that acted as a tour guide. The tour guides helped point people in the right direction and helped to open locks.
I think our class liked the end product and the process because being able to say that you made an actual escape room is pretty cool and it's also really fun when the students are actually doing something you created. It's really interesting to watch how the students figure it out and then say "YESSS" at the end. I think that this was a really difficult project that we had on our hands but we made an awesome end product. The only thing that we will probably change next time is starting earlier but apart from that, nothing. I think that the escape room was a big hit! I can't wait to do it next year.                                                                          

This page turner took our guests further down their escape route.

Before the chaos

During the chaos

Chaos continues

Albert Einstein read out clues in the Science and Technology museum exhibit.

A guest trying to solve the clues.

Trying to solve clues

Do these clues all add up?

The numbers that the clock is pointing to will lead the way!

The Staff!

2015 Let's Get it Started!

This is the dawn of a new school year, and we'd like to get it started with a summary of what's been goin' on!  Before the election we took part in something called the student election, where schools all over the country sign up and  participate. Three classes participated in our school. Then we took about a week and researched who we wanted to vote for. One week later we set up a voting station on our third floor, and through out the day, we went up in pairs to vote! the Liberals and NDP's tied, and we were all hoping that it would result the same in the real world.

  Then when Liberals won, we took a class field trip to the swearing in ceremony of Justin Trudeau (which was amazing),  then we were inspired to make our own government. Tiiu is now Prime Minister of our class and we are now our own cabinet ministers! We have Ministers of Environment, Ministers of Social Media, a Minister of Horticultural Arts, Minister of Rodent Affairs, and loads more! Each and every minister has it's own job and responsibilities, like feeding guinea pigs, filing work, reminding Tiiu of birthdays, bringing up the lunch food, writing blog posts, and finding good activities to do with the class.Minister of Forms says: I think the Ministry jobs are good because our room is more organized and everybody likes their jobs. I love my job. I collect the forms that come in like for field trips. I check people off lists. I think it's helping me to talk to everybody because I was only talking to my friends before. The class finds it fun because we got to pick our jobs. We feel like we have our own duties to do every day. We are taking responsibility and initiative as we take ownership over our departments. It's also a benefit to Tiiu, because she has more time freed up to do other things. Secretary to the Prime Minister says: I think the jobs are a good idea. I have to do things that the Prime Minister asks me to do. I wanted this job because I like it when someone is telling me to do stuff instead of having to figure it out on my own. I also get to do different things instead of the same thing everyday.
We're loving our new jobs. This is a great start to a new year and we're looking forward to more!
 207 Cabinet Minsters
Canada's Cabinet Ministers

Minister of Forms says: I think the Ministry jobs are good because our room is more organized and everybody likes their jobs. I love my job. I collect the forms that come in like for field trips. I check people off lists. I think it's helping me to talk to everybody because I was only talking to my friends before.
Secretary to the Prime Minister says: I think the jobs are a good idea. I have to do things that the Prime Minister asks me to do. I wanted this job because I like it when someone is telling me to do stuff instead of having to figure it out on my own. I also get to do different things instead of the same thing everyday.