Valentine's Day ESCAPE ROOM: 10 Challenges, Resources and Answer Key

Using an Escape Room to develop curriculum knowledge is an exciting activity that will inspire learners from 2nd Grade to 5th Grade to learn more about Valentine's Day across the world.

The curriculum content of this Escape Room is linked to St Valentine’s Day, and in particular:

• Origins of St Valentine’s Day
• The language of “Love” and “I Love You”
• How different cultures celebrate Valentine’s Day
• Shakespeare’s views on love (quotations from plays)
• Love in songs (Titles and artists)
• Problem solving and cooperation

The aim of the Escape Room is to provide jeopardy for the children to work under pressure to solve 10 clues to help raise their knowledge of St Valentine’s Day. The 10 Challenges within this Escape Room will support knowledge and understanding of how Valentine’s Day has developed certain traditions throughout the world – as well as some fun activities too!

Included within this Escape Room:

• Pupil Answer Book (Code Key Booklet)
• Answer Booklet for teachers
• Starting script to set the scene of the Escape Room and explain what the students must do
• Concluding script, celebrating the learning which has taken place and allows the students to “leave” the Escape Room
• Table labels for students to name their own teams
• Full instructions to be able to simply print and go within your own classroom

Before beginning, you will need to prepare the following:

• A copy of the Pupil Workbook for each group
• A set of table team names for every group – prepared beforehand and given to each group to set up their own working space
• Initial Starting Script sharing the problem to the children
• Completion Script celebrating the completion of the challenge

Students do not need prior knowledge of Valentine’s Day to complete this Escape Room so is suitable for a one-off adventure for your students. The ability to have access to research resources will support the answers – but this is not necessarily needed.

The activity begins by the teacher reading the Initial Message received. It clearly tells the students that they are required to help raise their understanding of St Valentine’s Day through solving 10 Challenges in order to escape the room. The accurate completion of each of the challenges enables the students to move from one challenge to another. They must complete each challenge correctly before moving onto the next challenge, continuing the Escape Room collecting all ten!

After the 10th activity – the teacher can read the final script which reviews the learning the children have undertaken as they have completed each of the challenges. This script, together with team labels and the opening challenge script are contained within the Resource Pack.

Each activity focuses and builds the children’s knowledge of St Valentine’s Day

The 10 activities are based on the following outcomes:

• Word Search to introduce 14 key words from 14 different languages which mean love
• Linking the phrase “I love you” from 13 languages using key clues from the word “love” in Challenge 1
• Cloze Procedure, read the origins of Valentine’s Day and fill in the missing words
• Crossword to complete using the clues linked to the story of Valentine’s Day
• Identifying countries on a world map, learning how different cultures celebrate St Valentine’s Day and show Love on special days
• Shakespeare quotations of love linked to different plays
• Linking popular songs about with LOVE in the title to the artists who sang them
• Answer True and False to a range of facts about how the heart works – the symbol of love
• Navigate a maze to deliver a letter to a special person
• Using the nine letters from the word VALENTINE – make as many words as you can with three or more letters.

When all 10 activities are completed, and the students have gained the correct Code Keys from each activity, the final celebratory script can be read which reviews the learning and informs the students that they have been successful and can leave the Escape Room!

Setting up the Escape Room

1. Students should be split into groups of no more than four and be placed in their own workspace.
2. Access to IT and research materials can be provided to allow students to research answers to questions and review their own knowledge, as well as checking answers.
3. Each group should have a Code Key Booklet and decide on a team name
4. Read the Initial Message to the children to set the challenge in context. Discuss what this means, and what the activity entails.
5. Turn to Code Key 1. Agree with the students a set time to complete the problem in – this ensures that the students stay on task and maintains the Escape Room element of working under pressure.
6. At the end of the time, students should have filled in the Code Key in their booklet. The teacher can then check the accuracy of all the groups and talk through the responses the students should have.
7. Move on through the remaining challenges until all 10 have been completed.
8. For those groups who have been successful, they are then able to read the completed statement where they find out if they have escaped the Escape Room!

There are other ways of running Escape Room activities, for example, each activity could be set up on 10 tables and the students then move from table to table completing the activity. This would reduce the need for as many resources, and access to non-fiction sources and Internet Resources could then be targeted at specific Challenges.

The Escape Room should last for at least 2 hours.

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