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

Learning numbers actually involves a few different skills, from recognizing the shape of the number and knowing the word that goes with it to understanding one to one correspondence for counting and what order the numbers go in.

A lot of this is learned best through play and activities that get kids counting and tracing and otherwise interacting with numbers. These activities can help.

I specifically mentioned tracing above because of these number formation rhymes cards from Teaching Mama, which can be used in lots of ways to practice making the shapes of the numbers, including tracing, lining up items on the number shapes (and counting them!), using playdough to shape the numbers and so on. Each number has a little rhyme to help you remember how to make it, which is cute.

And speaking of playdough, you can find lots of playdough number mats with different themes for kids to use as they learn about numbers. Preschool Play and Learn, for example, has these cute apple themed ones that also teach one to one correspondence as you learn the numbers and count to 10.

Or use these tree-themed ones from Live Over Cs to form the numbers, count out items on a ten frame and place the correct number of items in the tree to match the number (do this with playdough, little buttons or whatever manipulatives you have on hand). Your little builders will also love these Duplo number mats from Life Over Cs, which allow you to shape the number out of blocks and count out the number of blocks that corresponds to each number.

I also love these mats from The Savvy Sparrow that include the number and the word you can trace with playdough or marker, showing how to count the number on your fingers, a tens frame and a number line.

Finger plays and counting songs are lots of fun for little ones, too, and Childhood 101 has a great collection of songs and rhymes having to do with numbers (as well as printable song cards you can use with them.

This cardboard roll number chain form Hands On As We Grow would be a fun addition to singing number songs or to use in other play and counting games. And we all love something easy to make with stuff we already have.

Older kids who already know the order of numbers can also use these connect the dot number printables from Fun Learning for Kids. Or use the shapes for playdough mats or to practice tracing even for kids who don’t know all the numbers in order yet.

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