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Deals with puzzling crimes. Always has a cliff hanger or keeps secrets throughout the story. Always has a situation that needs to be solved.

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A strong hook
Active reader involvement
Read herrings
Suspenseful dialogue
Effective, descriptive mood and language
Well structured chapters
Satisfying conclusion

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You could have each student fill in the blanks and have them write their own story idea for a mystery story.

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Give each student a different mystery book and have them write a news article like you would find in the newspaper about the mystery from their book.

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The Ultimate Teachers Guide to teaching the Mystery Genre

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Attached is a small set of Lesson Plans to teach Middle School students (6th or 7th grade) mystery through the book The 39 Clues Book One: Maze of Bones by Rick Riordan.

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Playing the game clue is a way for students to understand how mystery works and gives them a real life mystery they have to solve.

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A mystery unit is perfect for a classroom of curious kids! There's excitement in the suspense, significance in every detail.... and spooky thrills to keep students engaged throughout the class' mystery literature studies. Mystery units can work in amazing ways by integrating problem-solving and close-reading skills in a painless and fun way. Below is a list of 11 ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING A MYSTERY UNIT with games, reading and writing activities, and sleuthing a plenty!

1. MYSTERY ELEMENTS:

Help students learn about the mystery elements: detective, sleuth, witness, suspect, clues, red herring, case, crime, victim, alibi, evidence, hunch, motive, suspense, breakthrough, deduction, criminal. Play I HAVE WHO HAS game with these vocabulary terms. (These can be found in the mystery writing unit below.)

2. MAGNIFYING GLASSES:

During the whole mystery study, have students use plastic magnifying glasses to assist in their detective skills. It will help motivate the students to learn the mystery genre. You can see a variety of magnifying glasses here on Amazon.

5. MYSTERY BOOK STUDY:

Our Rockin' Resources Bunnicula Unit can be used alongside the book, Bunnicula , for whole group, small group, literacy centers, book clubs, or mystery studies work! This complete literacy unit contains reading comprehension questions, writing exercises, and other activities! The Bunnicula unit is available for digital use in Google Slides and PowerPoint, too!

6. CLUE GAME:

What better way to discuss mysteries than to play the board game, Clue? Discover who killed a fictional character, what room, and which weapon was used through many clues. This will strengthen deductive reasoning and logistical thinking skills! Order the game HERE.

11. BUILDING A MYSTERY GROUP ACTIVITY:

Put students in groups. Provide a big piece of paper. Each student gets a section of the paper to write and draw their portion.

Student 1: Develops characters

Student 2: Tells the setting and the crime (keep it away from violence-missing or kidnapping works)

Student 3: Tells the suspects and motives

Student 4: Gives the clues

Student 5: Tells the solution

Present to class

I hope you found some of these mysterious activities will work with your kiddos! Turn off the lights and get spooking!

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11 Activities for Teaching a Mystery Unit

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A mystery unit is perfect for a classroom of curious kids! There's excitement in the suspense, significance in every detail.... and spooky thrills to keep students engaged throughout the class' mystery literature studies. Mystery units can work in amazing ways by integrating problem-solving and close-reading skills in a painless and fun way.

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Setting up a crime scene in your own classroom can help students understand how mystery works. There will be many stations for students to explore and try to solve their own mystery

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Tip 3: Set the stage for learning

Instead of handing students a workbook and telling them to go solve each crime, I would suggest getting into character and really setting the scene. This helps students to get excited about the event.

"Grade Three! Something terrible has happened in our classroom. Someone or many people have broken into our room and committed crimes. The police need your help to solve them. Will you be Junior Detectives for the day and help me to figure out what happened to our beloved classroom?"

The more engaged you are, the more engaged they will be in return.

Tip 4: Start the activity together

After I invited students to become Jr. Detectives for the day, we all entered the Crime Scene Classroom together, as one group. Then, we proceeded to the first scene together. Here, made observations and inferences as a group so that all students understood how to participate in the activity. By modeling this, students had a good understanding of how to visit each crime scene and make observations without rushing. (Well, most of them at least!)

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Inferencing Activity: Crime Scene Classroom - Poet Prints Teaching

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Instead of handing students a workbook and telling them to go solve each crime, I would suggest getting into character and really setting the scene. This helps students to get excited about the event. "Grade Three! Something terrible has happened in our classroom. Someone or many people have broken into our room and committed crimes.

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"Building a mystery group activity"
The students will be put into groups with an envelope that will have different elements and characters that they have to build into their story. They will all collaborate and write a mystery story after I read an example mystery story. Then they will present this story.

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A mystery unit is perfect for a classroom of curious kids! There's excitement in the suspense, significance in every detail.... and spooky thrills to keep students engaged throughout the class' mystery literature studies. Mystery units can work in amazing ways by integrating problem-solving and close-reading skills in a painless and fun way. Below is a list of 11 ACTIVITIES FOR TEACHING A MYSTERY UNIT with games, reading and writing activities, and sleuthing a plenty!

1. MYSTERY ELEMENTS:

Help students learn about the mystery elements: detective, sleuth, witness, suspect, clues, red herring, case, crime, victim, alibi, evidence, hunch, motive, suspense, breakthrough, deduction, criminal. Play I HAVE WHO HAS game with these vocabulary terms. (These can be found in the mystery writing unit below.)

2. MAGNIFYING GLASSES:

During the whole mystery study, have students use plastic magnifying glasses to assist in their detective skills. It will help motivate the students to learn the mystery genre. You can see a variety of magnifying glasses here on Amazon.

5. MYSTERY BOOK STUDY:

Our Rockin' Resources Bunnicula Unit can be used alongside the book, Bunnicula , for whole group, small group, literacy centers, book clubs, or mystery studies work! This complete literacy unit contains reading comprehension questions, writing exercises, and other activities! The Bunnicula unit is available for digital use in Google Slides and PowerPoint, too!

6. CLUE GAME:

What better way to discuss mysteries than to play the board game, Clue? Discover who killed a fictional character, what room, and which weapon was used through many clues. This will strengthen deductive reasoning and logistical thinking skills! Order the game HERE.

11. BUILDING A MYSTERY GROUP ACTIVITY:

Put students in groups. Provide a big piece of paper. Each student gets a section of the paper to write and draw their portion.

Student 1: Develops characters

Student 2: Tells the setting and the crime (keep it away from violence-missing or kidnapping works)

Student 3: Tells the suspects and motives

Student 4: Gives the clues

Student 5: Tells the solution

Present to class

I hope you found some of these mysterious activities will work with your kiddos! Turn off the lights and get spooking!

See Similar Blog Posts:

Discover Related Resources

Share this Post on Pinterest:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
11 Activities for Teaching a Mystery Unit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A mystery unit is perfect for a classroom of curious kids! There's excitement in the suspense, significance in every detail.... and spooky thrills to keep students engaged throughout the class' mystery literature studies. Mystery units can work in amazing ways by integrating problem-solving and close-reading skills in a painless and fun way.

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Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get?

"The hotel is hungry. And we aren't leaving here until it's fed." In what reads like a determined effort to check off every trope of the genre, Alexander sends new arrival Jasmine, along with two friends and several dozen other classmates, to the long-abandoned Carlisle Hotel for the annual seventh grade Dare-touching off a night of terror presided over by the leering, autocratic Grand Dame and complete with sudden gusts and blackouts, spectral visions, evil reflections in mirrors, skeletons, a giant spider, gravity reversals, tides of oily black sludge sucking screaming middle schoolers down the drain, and so much more. (No gore, though, aside from a few perfunctory drops of blood from one small scratch.) The author saves a twist for the end, and as inducement to read alone or aloud in the dark by flashlight, both his language and the typography crank up the melodrama: "He walks toward us, past the mirror, and I see it- / a pale white face in the reflection, / a gaunt, skeletal grimace, / with sharpened teeth / and hollow black eyes, staring at him / with its mouth / wide / open / in a scream...." Jasmine presents White; her closest friends are Rohan, whose name cues him as South Asian, and Mira, who has dark skin.

Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest. (Horror. 10-13)

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Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get? "The hotel is hungry. And we aren't leaving here until it's fed."

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Detective novels
Cozy mysteries
Police procedural
Caper stories

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NANCY CLANCY, SUPER SLEUTH | Kirkus Reviews

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Fancy Nancy is back, this time in a chapter book.

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In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you've ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school-aged refugees-Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo-eventually intertwine for maximum impact.

Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: "See us....Hear us. Help us." With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.

Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author's note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)

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"Synergy" is the name of the game in Scholastic's post-Potter search for market share. Grace Cahill has died, and her orphaned grandchildren Amy, 14, and Dan, 11, are among the heirs offered a choice: They can accept one million and walk, or they can take the first clue in a worldwide scavenger hunt to find the secret that has made the extended Cahill family the most powerful family in world history.

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by Craig Smith ; illustrated by Katz Cowley ‧

The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.

In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a "wonky donkey" that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a "winky wonky donkey" with a taste for country music and therefore a "honky-tonky winky wonky donkey," and so on to a final characterization as a "spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey." A free musical recording (of this version, anyway-the author's website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch-sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley's informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.

Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)

Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2018

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by Craig Smith ; illustrated by Katz Cowley ‧ The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty. In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road.

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by Andrea Beaty ; illustrated by David Roberts ‧

The Questioneers are back for a new early chapter book, this one featuring Sofia Valdez, of Sofia Valdez, Future Prez (2019) fame.

Sofia and her friends from Miss Greer's second grade class are back for another adventure. This time around, an election to select the new class pet offers lots of what Miss Greer likes to call Learning Experiences. Young civic activist Sofia is put in charge of managing the election, which pits candidates backed by two of her best friends against one another. Meanwhile, her cousin Marisella grapples with a pet problem of her own. Between friends and family, the election pulls Sofia in all directions, and she realizes that overseeing a fair election that runs smoothly proves to be a real challenge. Fortunately, she has sage advice from Abuelo and help from the local library to guide her. The short chapters and ample illustrations make for an accessible and entertaining early chapter book, full of fun and, yes, learning experiences. Extensive backmatter includes information on the importance of a free press, the true historical events behind Abuelo's stories, and more information on how the voting process in the United States works. Sofia and her family have brown skin and are of Mexican heritage; her friends are diverse; and Miss Greer presents White. Marisella uses a wheelchair.

Questioneers fans will not be disappointed; new fans will find this outing a timely introduction to the series. (Fiction. 6-9)

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WHO PUSHED HUMPTY DUMPTY? | Kirkus Reviews

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by Andrea Beaty ; illustrated by David Roberts ‧ The Questioneers are back for a new early chapter book, this one featuring Sofia Valdez, of Sofia Valdez, Future Prez (2019) fame. Sofia and her friends from Miss Greer's second grade class are back for another adventure.