Unit overview and description:

Universal Theme: Exploration

• Exploration confronts the unknown.
• Exploration requires taking risks.
• Exploration may result in new findings, or the confirmation of old findings.
• Exploration requires recognizing purpose and responding to it.
• Exploration requires leadership.

Essential Questions:

• How do I know that I am reading a mystery and not some other kind of fiction?

• How can context clues help determine the meaning of words within a text?

• How are world’s created through language?

• What questions should I ask about the text?

Enduring Understanding: 

• Sometimes authors make meaning plain; often however, a reader must dig beneath the ‘surface’ of the text to find the meaning.
• Distinguish between explicit clues and inferences drawn from the text.
• Discern which passages from texts contribute to the development of a texts plot, setting, and/or theme.
• Accomplished researchers employ strategies to help them research information.

The Texts that we will explore in class:

An introduction to the Genre

Intro Prezi

Theme 2 Book List

The Landlady

Video version via educannon

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Sherlock Holmes

Inductive and deductive reasoning

• Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century
• Compare and contrast Infographic Example
• Infographic project directions and rubric
• Group Summary for a Movie Adaptation​

Guiding Questions:
How do we know what we think is true?  How is this type of mystery similar to/different from the Edgar Allan Poe style of Mystery?
Enduring Understanding:
Distinguish between explicit clues and inferences drawn from the text.
Writing Prompt: Compare and contrast the text version of “The Red Headed League” with the 22nd Century cartoon version.
Extension Activity:
Rewrite another short story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” making it a proper 22nd century version for the cartoon series.

Sherlock Holmes Hyperdoc

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Related texts

Take a Quiz

Jabberwocky



• Jabberwocky read aloud with text
• Alice in Wonderland version
• Watercolor version
• Saruman version
• Animated version
• Muppets version

Do you think that the poem is best if it is allowed to be different for every reader? Or ought we try as students to figure out exactly what a mome rath is?
How do the workings of individual imaginations both help and hinder the broader understanding of the poem?

Jabberwocky hyperdoc

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The Raven & 
The Death of E.A. Poe

​Part 1: The Raven

• The Simpsons version via educannon
• A refresher on Edgar Allan Poe

Part 2: Edgar Allen Poe

Guiding Questions:
What is most important in this text?
How can I tell?
What questions should I ask about the text?
Enduring Understanding:
Accomplished researchers employ strategies to help them research information.
Writing prompt: Describe the life of Edgar Allan Poe and how events in his own life may have influenced his writing.

 

E.A. Poe Hyperdoc

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Other Stuff

The "POE"ster project: The theories about the mysterious death of Edgar Allan Poe.

Mystery Pictures:  "What's Going on Here?" 

• Why are we doing this?

1. Watch this video of teachers learning to have Mystery Picture discussions Visual Thinking Strategies or this one showing Students Using VTS
   

• Follow #MysteryPicMonday for additional discussions on our Instagram page
• These strategies easily transfer to other subjects and tasks:

1. What's going on in this chapter? Text? primary source document? cartoon? commercial?  in this math problem? diagram?  work of art?
2. What details, observations, background knowledge (schema) led you to that conclusion?
3. What evidence supports this conclusion? What does it remind you of?
4. What more can you say? What else do you think? What was the message? Theme? author's Purpose?
5. Why does it matter?

• Play a round of 5 card Flickr

History Connections: CSI investigations
King Tut: Natural Causes or Foul Play?
Mayans: Where did they go?

Minute Mysteries: 

• An introduction from the authors of One Minute Mysteries
• Encyclopedia Brown
  
• Old Time Radio Version
• The Murder Mystery Game

Now that you have seen several versions of "Minute Mystery" videos, how about making your own video? You can act it out, use pictures with text, use stop motion animation, PowToon, or whatever else you can think of.