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Escape Rooms: How Do I Get Out of Here? Part 2 (O&M)

Escape room activities are a fun way to develop team-building and other skills. This post describes an O&M-themed escape room activity.

“Escape Rooms” are a creative and fun way to develop team-building and other skills in students with visual disabilities. In Part 1 of this series, I describe escape rooms and how we have used these activities in the context of a vision class.

In this post, I describe an escape room activity that was based on Orientation & Mobiity concepts.

Theme: O&M skills

Location: Hallways and rooms in a middle school

O&M skills Addressed: Map skills, intersections analysis, use of monocular, use of verbal directions

Clues:

We started halfway down on the sixth grade hall and the student was given a map to follow:

 

Map of a L-shaped indoor route in a school with starting point and destination marked.

 

The map shows an L-shaped route with symbols for the starting point and destination point. The destination is also marked with the number 7133. The student had to figure out that the number was on a locker at the destination point.

 

When the student opened the locker, he found a line drawing of an offset intersection:

 

Print map of off-set intersection.

 

The task was to walk to the nearest hallway intersection that was offset in shape (a four-way intersection in which two of the streets or hallways align asymmetrically with the intersecting hallway). 

 

When the student reached the intersection, he was given a monocular telescope and was told to find four yellow notes with words on them which had been taped around the intersection:

 

 

Two yellow notes taped on walls in a hallway intersection

 

The notes had the words “cook,” “nook,” “book,” and “look” written on them. When the student had found all four notes, I recited the following riddle:

 

“In a room where you cook,

There is a little nook,

Where you might read a book.

This is where you must look.”

 

This clue was very challenging for the student, but with some instructor hints he eventually realized that he had to go to the cafeteria, where there is a little reading nook set up on the stage:

 

Reading area with chairs and bookshelves

 

The most fun part of this escape room was that the student’s brother (who is also a vision student) was secretly hiding in the reading nook, and the “escapee” discovered him while searching for the next clue. Boy, was our escapee surprised! The brother was holding a drum stick, because the escapee plays drums in the school band. This was the final clue to “escape” the activity, which was to go to the door of the band room. 

 

My student really enjoyed the activity, and at the end he expressed a wish that it could have gone on longer! We are now having a great time planning an escape room for his brother…

By Luv2TeachAll

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