The Christmas Escape Room
The Christmas Escape Room has been a popular addition to our workshops. The aim is to find all of the 3D shapes which will join together to make a 3D present cube and all in 30 minutes.
Starting with Christmas crackers, participants get clues inside the cracker and must work out the first part of the riddle and then locate the matching second half hidden in Christmas cards. These puzzles included fractions, greater/less than and arithmetic. Once they have solved both halves, they will have four-digit codes to unlock the lock boxes on Scrooge and Marley’s Chest. Inside the chest is hidden a present piece and star which plugs into the top of a Christmas tree; once plugged in and lit up the players get a 10-minute time bonus.
The lock boxes contain another puzzle piece and more challenges to complete. A playmat of a town gave the participants the chance to learn about grid references and also explored puzzles with percentages. The stocking maze challenge involved solving a series of sums to start from a specified number and end on a digit to put into a padlock. Finally, the participants needed to use accurate counting using a book code and a Christmas Carols book to find 5 letters to unlock the final present piece.
Christmas Craft Sessions
Christmas craft sessions were a nice way of encouraging those low in confidence and convinced they ‘didn’t want to do maths’ to take part. Making decorations and gifts really inspired nervous people to have a go because the maths was less obvious or intimidating.
We made pop-up Christmas cards using protractors and rulers to create geometric shapes which, when joined, made a Christmas tree.
Candle making was something a bit different, with participants needing to calculate volume of the jar, volume and therefore height of the wax within the jar (based on measurements taken), weight of wax using percentages to adjust for density of wax vs. water volume and area of jar for any decoration. This activity used a lot of formulas but proved that even though they looked intimidating they were often less scary and simpler than they appeared. At some of the events, we substituted candles for light jars depending on the location of delivery and numbers in the group. Light jars also involved surface area of a cylinder making decorations for the jar using shapes.
Our final Christmas activity was a decoration using circumference of a circle, sequences and measurements. This was a very popular craft activity.
SEND Adult Number Confidence Activities
We’ve had some great fun with our SEND adults developing number confidence skills, counting and addition.
Pass the parcel fractions helped our users to understand how to make a whole piece by finding other people with the same denominator (bottom number) and joining their pieces together to make a full circle. We then asked each person to choose a snowman with a number on, find the hat with the same number of dots and a scarf with a sum which made the same total.
We ran a mini version of our Christmas escape room using the Christmas crackers and Christmas stocking maze to find the star to light up the Christmas tree.
Finally, the snowball bowling tournament went down really well and was a great chance for everyone to work on scoring together as well as having a lot of fun competing, as well as the reindeer antler toss game.
