Mystery Festival

Lauren Natho, Steph Bridwell, Ruth Frei

            Mr. Bear Mystery project will be using Science to solve a mystery and to draw 2nd –- 8th grade students into Science.  Many students love mysteries and even if they don't like Science, many students like to investigate, explore, and do experiments inside and outside the classroom.  The Mystery Festival unit will combine mystery and investigation in a highly exciting, engaging and educational experience.  Our student detectives will conduct many hands-on forensic science tests on evidence found at the “"crime scene."”  Like many mysteries, this mystery of Mr. Bear is going to be layered in complexity, and some students depending on the grade level and experience may arrive at fairly simple solutions while other students may see through the superficial, misleading evidence and come up with more complicated solutions, evening involving conspiracies, deceptions, and other conniving schemes.  The first session of the unit:  you will set up make-believe “crime scene” that will launch an entire five day festival of exciting investigations.  The second session of the unit:  you help the class use a “Clue board” to organize their observations of the evidence they gathered at the crime scene, which has by now been dismantled.  The third and fourth session of the unit:  your classroom is transformed into a forensic laboratory.  The fifth session of the unit:  after all observations, experiments and discussions, the class attempts to solve the mystery.  At the conclusion of any Mystery Festival,   the teacher is hounded by students eager to know, “"Who really did it?"” Of course, no one really did it, since these are made-up mysteries, but we have specific scenarios in mind when designing them to keep the student intrigued.