If you want to have some fun during these last classes and happen to be dealing with the topic of Education and your groups need to revise for verb tenses and some work on reported speech, this is for you.

I’ve just set up an escape room (for the first time because I’m doing a course).

In case you’re not familiar with the place ‘Cruncham Hall’ It was borrowed from Roald Dahl’s story Matilda. Matilda will not be in this escape room, but you will meet Miss Honey and, of course Miss Trunchbull, the abusive head of the school who terrorizes her students with ‘creative’ over-the-top punishments.

Aim: to revise vocabulary related to education, verb tenses and reported speech. In this activity, part of the assignment was to create a video, so that’s just what I did. It might be a little long because I have a tendency to get a bit carried away in everything that I do and have serious problems to keep things short and simple. After playing the video, you will find the printouts where students should write down their answer, codes, etc.

The next step is to dive into the Cruncham Hall experience. Will you be able to get out of this situation in less than 60 minutes?

How to use this activity

If you’re going to do it as a classroom activity, you will find the list where students in teams can write their solutions and the codes that they find. As an update (19/05/2025) I’ve seen that one of the codes on the presentation no longer works and I cannot fix it as when I created the presentation I was working at a different school and I do not have access to my old email address (this happens when one is an ‘interina’). But, if you download the students’ document, you will see that I have placed a QR code that students can scan.

• Print the document you have below.
• watch the video for context and instructions on what the students need to do
• Click on the escape room link
• Have students find clues and solve the situation in approximately 45 minutes (Trunchball gives 60 minutes, but 45 is normally enough)

Credits:

I used Corel VideoStudio Pro and Audacity for the video. Trunchbull’s office was a combination of AI-generated images and my own using Affinity Photo. Other images are from Pexels and Giffer.com, where I would like to give my thanks to all the generous artists that allow teachers to use their content. For the voice, I recorded myself on Audacity and tailored the sound to make it sound like an answering machine.

For the escape room, I used Canva, where I uploaded the content I had used for the video, along with some of the images that Canva makes available, even for those who are not going premium.

PS. I’ll be adding some more slides to the escape room in the near future, which will give it a more WOW component. So keep tuned in!