Check out this Awesome Christmas Themed Escape Room Activity

If you’re looking for a super fun classroom activity for the days before holiday break, you’re having a bunch of kids over for Christmas who you need to entertain, or you just want a cool family game night idea with a Christmas theme, you need to check out this awesome Christmas escape room from Hands on Teaching Ideas.

Now I’m going to say right up front that there is a lot of setup involved in this. You will probably need to buy some things like transparency paper, a lockable box and a recordable button. The printables that go with the escape room are also a paid item, but this person definitely deserves a little compensation for doing all the heavy lifting for us, and of course you can reuse it year after year.

The blog post at Hands on Teaching Ideas walks you through all the steps, starting with a secret message that becomes readable with the help of transparency paper. Participants will solve clues using Christmas songs, hunt for candy canes to find the code to open a lock box to put together a puzzle, use Christmas lights to break a code and use a magnet to find the final prize.

Even that sounds like a lot but there are more steps I didn’t mention, so you’ll see that this is a game that should keep players entertained for a while.

I’m so impressed by people who can come up with cool ideas like this and I wish I’d known about this one when my kiddo was little enough to enjoy it. But I really think older kids and adults would have fun with this one, too. If you give it a try for a holiday party or game night I’d love to hear bout how it went!

Check out the walkthrough of the game on Hands on Teaching Ideas, and you can grab the printables here.

[Photo: Hands on Teaching Ideas]

Check out the kids craft section on Craftbits.com

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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