There are so many fun things to do with reading and with literature in escape rooms.
To give you an idea, here are a few examples of escape rooms that have a reading or literature theme.
Dragons at Crumbling Castle. A short story by Terry Pratchett: https://sites.google.com/view/dragonsatcrumblingcastle/home
Hamlet:
https://sites.google.com/view/tobewrongortoberight/home
Hogwarts:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflNxNM0jzbZJjUqOcXkwhGTfii4CM_CA3kCxImbY8c3AABEA/viewform
Fairy Tale Quest
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSelyeSJyViUxpCRwhfd7tEjj1IQMcYanJ4AONCMGDFd-qwzoQ/viewform
Escape rooms can be an excellent tool for testing the understanding of texts, stories and books. As you can see in the escape rooms above, they all use source texts as their main theme. So why not do an escape room after you have read a text with the class. Or when you watched a movie based on a book.
The easiest way to use reading in your escape room is the use of multiple choice questions. This will already generate a code (BACD)
But there are plenty more ways to use reading.
1 Chronological order
You can have pieces of a text that the students have to re-arrange in chronological order. This can be a story that they already know, such as a fairy tale, or a story with a clear structure.
2 Take sentences out of the story or the text. Give the gaps a number so they match the number to the sentence to generate a numbers and letter code.
3 Which word in the text means.....
Give students descriptions of the word you are looking for. Use the first letters of the words to generate a letter code.
This exercise can be made more difficult when a longer text is given or easier when students get to choose between a few words.
4 This is the correct answer. Now where is it?
When students have difficulty in locating the answer in the text, you could have them practice this. This works well with CITO texts. Give them the multiple choice questions and tell them what the correct answer is. Then ask them to locate the answer in the text. You could ask for line numbers (to form a number code) or give them the different options in the text and they just have to place the correct answers in the correct order.
1 He said what?
You can use quotes from the book and let them match this to a character.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fh_QmccdG_Ftejr9Rx-kj-cQ41_7iisD2mQcaPu9P8Y/view
2 Descriptions
You can describe different scenes or characters and the students match them.
3 background stories
You can add some background that will make them understand the story even more.
https://sites.google.com/view/kingsroundtable/home
4 use YouTube clips
of the film version or even clips with explanations or reviews about the book.
https://sites.google.com/view/tobewrongortoberight/the-simpsons
5 different covers
Mash up book covers or make different book covers and students have to guess which book it is or which two books have been mashed up. If you are doing a themed escape room e.g. dystopian literature or WWII. or poems.
you can glitch photos and blur photos with this tool https://photomosh.com/
Cambridge Reading & Use of English is perfect for escape rooms. Because they have a different way of using texts which always have, in for example a standard PET exam, either an understanding messages by matching (part 1), a matching people to situations (part 2), multiple choice questions (part 3), choose the correct sentence (part 4), choose missing words (part 5), write words in gaps (part 6). All of these tasks are good to use in an escape room.
When you have a theme that you want to use in your escape room, you can look for texts that match this theme and use it in your escape room.
Also the listening part can be used in an escape room. It might be necessary then to upload a sound file into your Google drive and link it from there.