One Hour Mysteries

These reproducible workbooks each contain five mysteries to solve. Unlike many other whodunit books, there are multiple steps students must take to solve the mysteries. Skills include deductive reasoning, inferring, taking notes, organizing data, and analyzing evidence. Each mystery includes a teacher section, which has clues and other directions for teachers to read to students. Students listen to the clues, read the mystery on the student pages, fill out forms, and use various forensic techniques to solve the puzzles. The entire process takes about an hour per mystery. All the books follow the same format but have different mysteries. Mysteries in the first book involve a missing tiara, Santa, and the mall among others while the second book includes a stolen will, a dog-napping, and a hoax. The third book is slightly different than the others, as it provides some additional material. Before students delve into the mysteries, they attend "Private Eye School," which is basically just a few teacher-aided activities to get them thinking outside the box and familiar with detective vocabulary and thinking. It also provides directions for students to write their own mysteries, create logic puzzles, and sketch their crime scene. Then they are ready to tackle the five mysteries including a pizza delivery gone wrong, vandalism and even a train robbery! Solving the mysteries is a lot of fun and helps students build valuable skills. By Mary Ann Carr; the first two have 64 pages and the third has 112; pb. ~ Rachel