Lesson Planning

I’ve discovered something about my experience of lesson planning.

In my few years of creating miniature units for the summer camp I teach at, I’ve found that if I get stuck on a lesson, like REALLY stuck, it makes doing literally anything else so much easier.

Let me elaborate, this summer I’m teaching my brainchild of a class, Teen CSI, which is just as it sounds, forensics for upper middle schoolers. The class teaches fingerprinting, shoe printing, and crime scene investigation. The final day, I figured it would be fun to do an escape room. Boy how I was wrong. Escape rooms sound fun until you have to make one. I tried making one, but I got lost so fast since i wasn’t able to make the props at the time, so everything was being done on a screen.

Whenever I open this slideshow to go and ‘plan’ my escape room (really just noodling on the other slides) my brain goes blank, I’ll do literally anything else. In fact, I finished all 11 other classes in-full before going back to Teen CSI and still drawing a blank.

I’ve resorted to buying a pre-made printable escape room on Etsy. While this isn’t a bad thing, and actually is far easier than I what I was doing, it feels like a cop-out. So, I’m naturally making it more difficult for myself. I think I’m gonna print it out, solve it, then make the printouts from it into tangible props that aren’t just paper with the same clues on them. I’m between buying a dinner party one, or a mystery manor one. Either way, I can make some cool props to set the scene.