As promised, new Escape Rooms Adventures are being created. My students love Escape Room adventures and they keep on asking for more. After the success of the Fractions Review Escape Room Adventures 1 and 2, I decided to create two new Escape room adventures for younger students to practice the multiplication, and division facts, as well as factors and multiples.
Fluency with multiplication and division facts enhances the students’ mental math skills and is part of the foundation for other concepts such as multi-digit multiplication, long division, fractions, algebra, and more. It is important to take time to practice multiplication facts conceptually, by discovering patterns and relationships and teaching strategies that help students gain fluency and automaticity without drills that promote meaningless memorization.
These resources are digital escape games in which the students have to solve the puzzles of one “room/scene” to move to the next one. The new ones are placed in a magical fantasy land with trolls, elves, and other fairytale characters. There are 10 scenes/puzzles in each Escape Adventure and the second adventure is a bit more challenging than the first.
The puzzles encourage problem-solving, are great for review, warm-ups, and practice, and can be used as individual work or group work. When the students solve these in a group or pair they tend to explain their thought process and teach their peers which is a great way to learn. Working in a group promotes collaboration and can also offer a bit of friendly competition as to which group will solve the puzzles first. The students will get a link from the teacher and they can work on their computers or tablets. I like to solve/discuss the puzzles with the whole class on the smartboard when they are done to clear any misconceptions and review the concepts of multiples, factors, equal expressions, square numbers, and more.
The game offers instant feedback in the sense that they need to get the correct answer to move to the next puzzle. They are prompted to try again in case of a wrong answer.
The students practice and review multiplication/division facts, factors, multiples, divisibility, and more. The students need to understand the concepts of multiplication and division and be familiar with the facts.
The puzzles are designed to be a bit challenging to make them interesting for the students. For some puzzles, the students need to figure out the “trick” to solving the puzzle and then apply their knowledge and understanding of multiplication, and division facts, factors, and multiples. Memorization is not necessary as the students can always use a multiplication table, however, fluency will help them to find relations and patterns easier.
Find the two Escape Adventures below.
Find Escape Adventure 1
Find Escape Adventure 2
