Lesson plan for lower secondary (double lesson, can be conducted also as a series of lessons)
You may use and adapt this lesson plan as you please for non-commercial purposes (CC BY-NC). Please, credit Line Reichelt Føreland & Lenka Garshol if publishing.
Introduction (5-10 min)
Today, we are going to try to solve a mystery. What do you think of when you hear the word “mystery”? (Brainstorm some ideas: murder, scary, danger, book, detective/police, film/series; names of some mysteries/authors they might know: Manifest, Stranger things, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Homes, Jo Nesbø…)
This mystery is a murder mystery. Someone has died and someone is being interrogated (do you know what interrogated means?). We have access to an old police archive, but the problem is that we can only access a couple of videos from the interrogation at a time and they are not organized in a timeline. We can only see/hear what the person responds, not what the question was because the investigator’s videos are lost. But we can search for any word we want and watch the videos which contain that keyword. We need to find out what happened.
So this is what we are going to do:
We will divide you into groups of 4-5 and each group will work as an investigation team.
You all have some papers in front of you. You can make a timeline, note down names and/or dates and any keywords which you think about while we watch.
After we watched the first 5 videos, each group needs to decide on one keyword which we will try next. After we have watched the videos for all keywords, each group should come up with a hypothesis about what happened.
When we have collected enough evidence, each group presents their final findings and we vote which one is the most believable/logical.
During gameplay (60-80 min)
The teacher questions assumptions and fascilitates discussion between the groups. Depending on the class environment and the maturity of the pupils, this game can get test the patience of some of the pupils. In some classes, it may be beneficial to play the game over a period of couple weeks.
Additional tasks
- Create a timeline of the story.
- Write a series of diary entries from the point of view of the different characters.
- Write a short story depicting your chosen interpretation of the story.
- Write (or record) a news story reporting on the ongoing investigation.