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Title screen of The First Day at School, a Back to School Latin escape room

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The First Day at School

A Back to School Latin escape room for Latin I

Works with: Cambridge Latin Course, Book 1, Stages 1–12

The first day of the school year in Pompeii: a stern schoolmaster, a class of boys and girls with their wax tablets, and Quintus, who has turned up without his. Solve seven puzzles to find out what happened to it.

Play the free taster (2 of 7 locks)Members: full room

The taster runs in the browser, with nothing to install. Members share a private class link that opens all seven locks. Sound adds to the atmosphere.

What's inside

  • 7 self-grading locks, all in Latin
  • Vocabulary from Cambridge Latin Course Book 1 (Stages 1–12)
  • Grammar: present, imperfect and perfect of scrībit and audit
  • Macrons never needed
  • Takes about one lesson
Illustration from the picture-count lock of The First Day at School

For teachers

Each of the seven locks practises something different:

  1. Crossword — the school, the family and the town, in Latin from Book 1.
  2. Anagrams — unscramble seven things pupils do in class.
  3. Cipher — decode a message in Latin, then answer the riddle it asks.
  4. Matching — two verbs from the schoolroom, scrībit ("writes") and audit ("hears"), in the present, imperfect and perfect.
  5. Picture Count — reassemble the schoolroom, then count what you see.
  6. Odd One Out — find the word that doesn't belong in each row to build the story, then answer questions about it.
  7. Final Rebus — one clue from every lock. Their first letters spell the final word.

Most classes take about 50 minutes. Students can work alone, in pairs or in small teams on any device with a browser, or you can project the room and solve it together as a class. Every answer checks itself, so you are free to circulate, and progress is saved in the browser, so a room can be split across two lessons.

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