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As the temperatures drop and the days get shorter, winter escape rooms help keep your students engaged and energized. With challenges themed around seasonal elements like snow, holidays, or arctic animals, students use critical thinking, problem-solving skills, and topical knowledge to solve puzzles. Use these teacher-approved winter escape rooms to warm up students’ minds for learning.

5 Winter Escape Rooms for Elementary Students

From math escape rooms to puzzle challenges aligned with ELA and SEL concepts, elementary students of any age can engage in escape room fun this winter. Make sure your puzzles aren’t too hard, and spend extra time explaining what an escape room is. To really enhance engagement, have props like winter clothing accessories, fake snow, and black scrap paper with white crayons or chalk. 

Winter Grammar Escape Room – ELA Grammar Review
By Uniquely Upper
Grades: 3rd-5th

This winter grammar escape room is the perfect tool for motivating your students to do their best while collaborating with peers. Pesky the Penguin is in trouble, and it’s up to your students to save him by completing five printable challenges that cover parts of speech, sentence structure, punctuation, capitalization, and context clues.

Size of the Problem Winter Escape Room Collaborative Learning SEL Activities
By Counselor Station
Grades: 3rd-5th

Support your students’ ability to size up problems with an engaging collaborative learning activity. Students will work in four groups to solve four quests to escape the avalanche while learning to discern the size of a problem and apply problem-solving skills and coping strategies. At each quest, students will unlock code words and earn a tile representing the tool needed to escape that quest.

Making Inferences Winter Escape Room | Escape the Blizzard | ELA Escape Room
By The Collaborative Class
Grades: 4th-6th
Standards: CCSS RL.4.1, 4.4, 5.1

Increase student engagement with this CCSS-aligned escape room activity, where students work collaboratively with partners or in groups to solve inference challenges to escape the blizzard!

Winter Escape Room 5th Grade Fraction Review Add Subtract Unlike Fractions Snow
By Educate with Ease – Reagan Briggs
Grades: 4th-6th
Standards: CCSS 5.NF.A.1, A.2

This winter escape room is an engaging review for adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. All clues are self-checking, and no locks or boxes are needed. Just print, cut, and go.

Winter Math Activities | Winter Math Puzzles | Winter Escape Room
By Under My Wing Learning
Grades: 4th-6th
Standards: CCSS 5.NBT.A.3, A.3b, A.4

Students are in their grandmother’s attic when they shake a cursed dusty snow globe and find themselves trapped inside it. To successfully escape, teams will need to use good communication, logic, attention to detail, and their trusty math skills.

4 Winter Escape Rooms for Middle & High Schoolers

Winter escape rooms for secondary students can be even more immersive than those made for younger students. You can incorporate book escape room ideas, social studies timeline challenges, middle school science experiments, Spanish matching games, and even complex riddles for high school. 

Winter Digital Escape Room
By 2peasandadog
Grades: 6th-8th
Standards: CCSS CCRA.SL.2, SL.6

Help your students beat the cold-weather blues with this winter digital escape room. Students work independently or with their peers to solve 10 hot chocolate-themed challenges to escape the locked cafeteria supply closet. 

Winter Themed Human Body Systems Digital Escape Room for Christmas
By Avery Science
Grades: 6th-9th
Standards: NGSS MS-LS1-3

You can’t beat this digital, no-prep, winter-themed escape room for human body systems! It challenges students to solve four puzzle locks using their knowledge of the body systems and how they work together. Students will decipher lock codes four questions at a time to move through the escape room. 

Spanish SER and Adjectives Winter Snowman Digital Escape Room
By Mastra in the Middle
Grades: 6th-10th

This digital escape room is perfect for practicing Spanish description vocabulary. Manuel el muñeco de nieve has lost his nose, and your students will take on the task of finding who took his carrot nose before he melts away! 

Geometry Transformations Winter Escape Room Activity: Digital Holiday Resource
By Moving Towards Mastery
Grades: 8th-12th
Standards: CCSS 8.G.A.1, A.3; HSG-SRT.A.1

Want to have a little fun while still challenging your students? This digital breakout is intended for reviewing transformations and has students practicing translations, reflections, rotations, and dilations.

Tips for Creating Winter Escape Rooms at School

Setting up your own escape room with a winter theme doesn’t have to be time-consuming or overly elaborate. You can use basic escape room ideas to create small challenges that add up to a big win.

• Use winter writing prompts to get your students to create a seasonal storyline that can be used for your escape room. 
• Use your existing winter classroom decor to inform your escape room storyline. 
• Mix general puzzles with winter challenges, like dressing a team member as a snowman while completing a 25-piece puzzle. 
• If you can, take a few puzzles and challenges outside, so students have to literally escape the cold. This eliminates the need for props and decor. 
• Ask your art teachers and PreK teachers to borrow some of the winter decorations and manipulatives they’re likely to have on hand. 
• As part of a larger project, have your students create winter-themed challenges, then compile them into a full escape room. 

Win over winter in your classroom with TPT

Unlike the winter season, escape room ideas for winter never end! These fun and engaging activities incorporate teamwork, critical thinking skills, and creativity to celebrate this snowy season.