The Game is Afoot, by Felicity Chapman

Middle schoolers enter the world of Sherlock Holmes and hard-boiled detectives in this unit on mysteries

In the early days of the school year, we're not thinking about dark and stormy nights. Our days are filled with tales of summer adventures, analyses of summer reading and discovering the students with whom we'll be sharing the next nine months. But when the back-to-school excitement has subsided and we get down to serious business, often we pass over Halloween with little more than a costume and a ghost story.

So I developed a unit that embraces the genre of mystery and suspense writing and allows students to explore the world of ghouls through four major projects in the areas of reading, writing, art and research. I introduced the unit in the first two weeks of school to allow students some time to work in class as well as implement peer editing sessions and share elements of the mystery genre through works we examine together. The unit culminates in a ghoulish celebration on Halloween that includes sharing of student projects.

Examining the evidence. When introducing the unit, I give each student a "Whodunit Requirements" sheet that explains how we'll be discovering the inner workings of the mystery genre. We'll read some stories together, and do some activities that will require students to work individually. We then review each section of the Whodunit Requirements, and discuss the unit requirements as well as the contract. The unit takes about eight weeks, with one assignment due each week in weeks five through eight. The activity choices include the following:

Reading: Each student selects a book or books from the genre. I pre-approve the books and assign a maximum point value to each one. Depending on the grade level you teach, you may decide that certain pieces are below the reading level of your students and opt to reject those books. For example, my eighth graders could not use books from R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series for this project. Instead, they discovered great authors of the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

For analysis of the books, you can have students do traditional book reports, oral reports, posters, bubble maps, etc. The sky's the limit. The more creative you are in the parameters, the more creative students will be in presenting their analyses of the books. Computer slide presentations of elements of the book work especially well.

Writing: Students choose between writing an original tale of suspense and mystery or rewriting a published mystery from a different point of view. For example, what if a Sherlock Holmes story was written from the perspective of the master criminal, Moriarty, instead of from that of Holmes' sidekick, Watson? This is a great opportunity to present elements of a short story. In-class lessons might include topics such as character development, the elements of plot and the role of setting. If time permits, stories are shared throughout the weeks of the unit.

Art: Art presents students with several options, including creating a poster for a fictional mystery movie, designing a cover for the story they wrote in the writing activity or designing a book jacket for one of the books they read. If you have the resources, you might even add a technology component, such as a computer slide presentation or creating a short trailer for a movie to go with the poster.

Research: The choices for the research projects allow students to investigate an area of suspense. The options include researching and writing a report on capital punishment, writing a biography of a mystery author or interviewing 50 people about their fears and graphing the answers. The graphs from this last selection are often spectacular. Some of my students created bar graphs in which pictures of the fears were depicted in each bar. Students who enjoy conducting more traditional research will enjoy the biography or capital punishment report options.

Mystery Contract: The mystery contract is a simple log that helps students and teacher examine how the student is doing. As assignments are completed and evaluated, they're entered on the contract, along with the number of points the student earned for completing each project. Additionally, I attach notes about the projects to the contract for more comprehensive assessment.

The assessment can be on a rubric, letter grade or point system. It's easy to adapt to whatever your current system is. I encourage opportunities in class for students to evaluate each other's work to peer edit and review rough drafts. I found the quality of pieces increased dramatically when more peer review was included.

This is a fun unit to include amid your regular curriculum. Standards are met by exploring elements of story and fiction within a specific genre. While some in-class work sessions should occur, class time is an opportunity for you to share your favorite elements of mystery and suspense from short stories to poems such as "The Highwayman," by Alfred Noyes, to excerpts from art and other media. Additionally, you may find that the success of this unit encourages you to produce similar units in other genres such as science fiction/fantasy.

For the "Whodunit Requirements" and the "Mystery Contract" click here. PDF 181KB

Felicity Chapman taught for a number of years. She is currently an educational consultant and a curriculum writer.