Escape Room Family Literacy Night

Big Beaver Elementary School in the Big Beaver Falls Area SD leveraged the currently popular concept of escape rooms to promote family literacy activities. For the uninitiated, escape room participants are locked in a room and challenged to break out by solving puzzles or completing challenges. The experience combines the elements of theater, game play and special effects. Students and parents were “locked” in various grade level classrooms together with a series of literacy challenges and mysteries that required them to work together to “break out”. Through the challenges families learned the “key” role literacy played in everyone’s life. Every student walked away with a book to continue their literacy experience and every parent left with a toolkit of how to encourage reading everyday at home. Parents described the event as, “the most fun they ever had at school while learning so much!”