Virtual Escape Room: Main Idea edition

The speaker discusses a virtual escape room activity called Main Idea Escape Room that their students completed. The theme of the escape room was an old spooky house and students had to choose left or right and find clues to answer main idea questions. They had to identify main ideas and supporting details to unlock codes for the next room. The activity was challenging but enjoyable, and students practiced teamwork and communication skills. The speaker highly recommends this activity for teachers to spice up main idea identification lessons. The activity was easy to navigate and could be done digitally. Overall, it was a great activity for fourth to sixth-grade students. Welcome to the podcast, this is Darian Hudson and I just wanted to jump on and chat about this great virtual escape room our students just completed last week. The title of the site is Main Idea Escape Room. This is a great activity for our students on Halloween because the theme of the virtual escape room was an old spooky abandoned house. The students followed the story of a bored middle school teenage aged person who wanted to scare their friends by going into an abandoned house and there's a great little passage that goes along at the beginning and then once they make it through the passage there's a short introduction in how the students navigate through the website. But once the students are in, they have to choose if they're going to go left or right and look at all the different clues that they can find throughout. And so students have an activity sheet that goes along with the clues on the interactive website where they have to answer what the main idea of the short piece of text they are reading about. This is a perfect activity to let students team up with a partner. The first room students have to escape from is a room full of photos and each photo has a short piece of text where the students identify the main idea. The catch is that if they choose the wrong topic for the main idea or if they spell any words incorrectly, they won't get the code to unlock to the next room. There's no word bank so the students have to rely on their prior knowledge as well as the skills they have been developing to identify the main idea. Once students make it through the first challenge, then they have to identify supporting details for a main idea that has been given to them. Once they unlock that code, then they have another short and quick activity where they're given three to four sentences and they have to identify the main idea of that text but this is a multiple choice option. So as their story goes along and the escape room goes on, the rigor becomes a little bit more easier. The really challenging part is definitely at the beginning of this activity. We saw a variety of responses to this activity. Overall, the kids loved it. They got to practice a skill that they have been working hard at with a partner. They also had to practice their teamwork and their communication skills. Students worked hard to unlock all of the codes. We did have some classes where the students, especially our class with our co-teach which is where we have the largest population of special education and students on a 504 plan who really struggled to find the main ideas and identify those topics and so we had to give a little bit more support for those groups but even though it was challenging for them, they still really enjoyed it and they were bummed when the class was over. They wanted to continue to work on this assignment. We used this activity on Halloween but honestly, this is a great activity for any time of the year. I highly recommend the main idea of virtual escape room to teachers who are looking for a way to spice up their lessons over main idea identification. This activity was very, very easy for students to navigate. We simply put a link inside of their Google classroom, the students were able to click on the link and the only thing that we had to provide was the activity sheet which we did print out ahead of time and we had a copy for every student but it would have been just as easy to have students fill that out on a Google doc as well or they could have worked together on one piece of paper rather than having every student turn in a piece of paper. At the end of the day, I would definitely recommend to any teacher to incorporate this lesson into their class. I do teach fourth grade English language arts and this was really, really great for fourth, fifth, maybe sixth grade depending on your group of students but this is an awesome activity and I definitely recommend it.