Allow your Students to get Excited about Social Studies! Examine, analyze, and interpret primary sources with your students in ways that will foster inquiry!

Promote authentic learning opportunities for your students to work with their peers to collaborate and solve historic mysteries, and current social issues.

Incorporate Language Arts, Science, and Math content into your Escape Room to foster new and exciting ways to explore the multiple content areas.

What topic/issue/problem do you want to explore? Historic mysteries are excellent topics for escape rooms, but the key to any escape room is answering a key question. That question might be a historical trial, a resolution to a controversial current issue, or even providing clues for students to identify a place, phenomena, or historic event ! When finding your topic, remember that not all topics are suitable for escape room lessons. Lessons pertaining to slavery, genocides, and other serious topics require sensitivity that an escape room may not provide.

Primary resources such as maps, paintings, photographs, letters, government documents, newspaper articles, audio and film clips will be key elements of your escape room. Remember primary resources come in all shapes and sizes, having students read long historic documents will be time consuming, so select short passages where necessary so that the students do not get to bogged down in one source and lose momentum. Secondary sources can also be very useful to provide students with context for unfamiliar topics.

Resources such as DPLA, DocsTeach offer lots of ready made primary source sets for teachers

Puzzles to open your "boxes" can come in all shapes and sizes. You may chose to construct boxes with actual locks, or simply use envelopes, folders, or even QR codes. How you open your "boxes" will depend on the kinds of clues and puzzles that you would like to develop. Puzzles might include mazes, ciphers, invisible ink, riddles, or just good ole primary source analysis! Remember to match the level of difficulty with your grade level, and that the goal of the escape room is usually not in solving the puzzle, but in analyzing the documents in order to answer your escape room "question."

There are many different ways to "escape" your social studies escape room.

Students may be provided with a number of clues in order to identify a historic event, a place, an economic concept, or a even a current issue.

Students might solve a mystery related to a historic event that remains unsolved.

Students might offer a verdict as to the guilt or innocence of a historic figure in relation to a historic event. ( Again---remember to use caution around sensitive topics)

Students might solve a current issue. Anything from deforestation of the rain forests to current policy issues. Current issue escape rooms will also provide you with excellent opportunities for interdisciplinary lessons with other content areas!

Individual and Group Reflections will provide your students with the opportunity to explore how their interpretation of the evidence might have been different from that of their peers. Allowing students to share out how their group solved a particular problem/puzzle will illustrate the nuances involved in analysis of each piece of evidence, and offer students the opportunities to share their different perspectives with their classmates.