Breakout Activities on a Budget

I was SO excited when I received my first Breakout kit through the mail. I could not wait to try it out with the students. I created the Haunted Castle Breakout activity that you might have seen on the website already. However, I soon realized that the group sizes were a little too large for everybody to enjoy the activity equally. Most students are engaged throughout the activity but unfortunately, they don’t get to try out all the puzzles. Sometimes students even end up arguing, as they all want to use the UV flashlight. That’s when I decided to have students solve the puzzles in teams of 4 instead. This way, everyone would get to witness all the puzzles. However, realistically, I couldn’t get one Breakout box per team and I therefore decided to print out slips of paper with an image of each lock instead. As you might have guessed by now, the box quickly became obsolete. It made me think... Our main objective is for the kids to interact orally while developing problem-solving skills. A teacher could actually buy a box and a lock from the dollar store and do the exact same activity. Therefore, I decided to revamp my Breakout learning and evaluation situations. You will now find a Without the Box version of my grade 6 Breakout activity. As I have bought the box already, I still use it but I changed the rules a little so that only the first team to solve a puzzle gets to open the lock. A budget-friendly way of maximizing the students' engagement would be to go on a quest for the perfect $1 box and $1 lock and grab one for each team of four.