If you are a high school life skills teacher and have recently introduced critical thinking to your students, providing your class with visual aids and the chance to solve problems with basic clues that are gathered through observations will help your students deal with trials and tribulations in real life. Use the two activities below to help your students enrich their minds while learning.

Visit An Escape Room

The purpose of an escape room is to challenge visitors by presenting them with a series of cryptic clues. Visitors are locked inside of an escape room at the beginning of a session and are provided with a specific amount of time to solve the clues that are given to them.

If the clues are solved correctly, an escape room's door will open and participants will be set free. If participants do not solve the clues properly, they will still be released, but may find that they would like to participate in the activity again so that they can attempt to solve the clues correctly. Reserve an escape room and provide your students with permission slips for the event.

On the day that your class participates in an escape room, wait until you and the students are locked inside of a room before sharing the clues with everyone. Stress the importance of reading the clues slowly and observing items inside of the room before trying to solve each clue. Allow your students to work together to solve the clues.

Do not offer any assistance, but instead, allow your pupils to learn by trial and error as they attempt to solve the clues. The escape room will not only teach your students about critical thinking, it will also demonstrate the importance of working as a team. 

Assign Students To Act In Skits

Think of common situations that would require someone to use their reasoning skills. Write the situations down on a piece of paper. For example, you could write about an incident that involves arriving home to find that the door is unlocked, other family members are not present, and lights are on or a store owner opening the safe in their office to find out that money is missing.

Separate your students into groups and assign one of the situations to each group. Ask your students to plan how they would like to act out each scenario. After the performance of each skit, discuss what occured with your students and provide them with insight concerning questions that they could ask themselves to acquire a better grasp of what occurred if they were faced with a similar situation in real life. 

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