It's been ages since I've blogged (the whole having babies thing), but now that the oldest is off to kindergarten, I'm finally finding a little wiggle room in my daily schedule to do stuff I love. Like blogging.
My new adventure for this fall is trying the Breakout trend. Educational Breakouts have been popular for a few years, so I'm a little late to the game. Over the summer one of my very favorite English teachers decided they wanted to try something new to change up their teaching routine, and since Breakouts were filling my Pinterest feed, we collaborated on designing a Breakout for her classroom. After digging into the whole process with her, I decided I was grooving on the concept, and planned my own Breakout for my library orientation activity.
The results? Breakouts are awesome. This is the MOST engaged I've ever seen my students. I've had MANY of them tell me how much fun they had and ask if we could do it in other classes.
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| Above: I LOVE watching the "ah-ha!" moments when they finally get it. |
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| Above: Team celebrations were pretty common when kids cracked clues. |
Now that we're into the 3rd week of school, I've run the same Breakout almost 40 times, as I've done it with every 8th and 9th grade English class that comes to the library for orientation. I'm certainly not an expert, but I've noticed a few things that have improved the process:
1) To save money, build your own Breakout kits. I was able to put together 4 complete Breakout kits using Amazon and the Dollar Tree. For each kit I bought 1 letter lock, a 4 pack of combination locks, 1 keyed padlock, 1 hasp, 4 lockable toolboxes, and a blacklight. I also bought 1 pack of UV Pens. Altogether, 4 complete kits cost about $180.00
2) Develop a system for organizing your locks. I have around 30 different locks between all my kits, and I realized early on that I needed a way to keep them all straight. This required two things: 1) Labeling each lock (I started by writing on them with a Sharpie -- it rubbed off, so I switched to Sharpie on masking tape - still not ideal - I'm hoping I can talk the tech department into using their engraver) and 2) Keeping a record of the combo I had assigned to each lock.
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| Above: Labeling each lock is essential when you have multiple kits. This is my current method, Sharpie marker on masking tape, but I think I'll see if the Tech dept will engrave them for me. |
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| Above: After labeling each lock, I made a little chart. Each time I changed the combo, I recorded on the chart. I also taped the directions for resetting each lock into the folder. |
3) Divide your class into teams (the smaller the better) and run multiple breakouts simultaneously. When first diving into this whole Breakout thing, the most difficult thing for me to wrap my head around was how to do a Breakout with a whole class. I still haven't quite figured out how classrooms can run only 1 game and have all students participate. Because I was able to buy purchase four kits, I was able to run 4 games simultaneously. For smaller classes, this
allowed 3 or 4 kids in a group, but for larger classes, the group size was 7. I noticed that the larger groups (5+) were NOT ideal - when you have big groups, it inevitably allows some students to sit back and let others do the thinking - they never really engaged with the material. In contrast, the smaller groups of 3 and 4 required EVERYONE to participate, and I know the activity was much more meaningful academically.
4) When working with bigger groups, have students elect a reader and a wrangler. In smaller groups (4 or less), this doesn't seem to matter as much, but in the large groups, teams need to identify a person that will be responsible for reading each clue out loud (so all members of the team can participate). I also found the larger groups needed to identify a leader (I called it a "wrangler"), responsible for making sure the group travels as a pack, encouraging quieter kids to share ideas, and in general, keeping all team members on task.
5) Color code the clues and assign each team a color. Because I ran 4 games simultaneously, I wanted to make sure teams didn't take another group's clue. To do this, I broke the kids up into teams, and assigned each team a color. They sat began the activity at tables with large colored signs that indicated their color.
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| Above: Each box was tagged with team colors. I also wrote the location of each box on the back of the tag, so I could quickly replace the boxes between periods. |
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| Above: Each team started the Breakout at a table with a sign indicating their team color. |
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| Above: All the clues were color-coded -- teams could only use clues that matched their color. |
6) Do everything possible to make re-staging quick and efficient. I have 3 minutes between periods to re-stage the Breakouts, which means loading clues into boxes and locking boxes back up. I also structured my Breakout so that although I had 4 games running simultaneously, each group encountered clues in a different order. To make my life easier, I created a folder for each clue location. So, for example, each group got an envelope with their first clue. On the front of my folder was a little color-coded chart telling me which clue went in each group's envelope. If the clue location required a code, I also wrote that on my folder. Inside my folder were extra copies of each clue - enough to get me through a whole day.
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Above: For each station, I had a folder filled with extra copies of each clue. I also made a little chart on the front of each folder that indicated what clue each team received at that station, along with the lock code, if necessary.
7) Don't set locks to combinations that are too easy to guess. To get into the final box, I originally had the word locks set to READ. It totally fit the activity, but it was so obvious for a library breakout that groups were able to guess the combination without doing ANY of the clues. This totally defeated the purpose of the activity. To make it more difficult, but without having to totally change the station, I switched the letter lock to DAER and added a line in the clue that said "Think you know the code? Sometimes people get things BACKWARDS." Stupidly, I also set one of the number lock combinations to "123" - also way too easy for a team to simply just guess.
8) Build a debriefing into your Breakout that can be done independently. When students work in teams, they will inevitably finish the Breakouts at different times. When a group finishes early, they need a task to occupy their time. I created a survey - students scanned a QR code that they found inside their final box when they were finished with the activity. Part of the survey asked students to reflect on both the activity and the content. In this case, the Breakout content served as an introduction to Banned Books Week, so students were asked questions like "Should school libraries censor books that a parent finds objectionable?"
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| Above: Following the Breakout, each student independently completed a survey. |
There's my round up of tips. Got any more to add? What have YOU done to make your breakouts a success?
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