New Year's Close Reading Digital Mystery Inference Activity - Fireworks Surprise

New Year's Close Reading Digital Mystery Inference Activity - Fireworks Surprise: Engage your students with a captivating digital close reading inference activity that challenges them to explore and find text evidence, make inferences, and read more closely. This resource provides all the necessary materials to facilitate this fun and creative reading activity in your classroom. Students will have the opportunity to work collaboratively, enhancing their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills as they unravel the mystery together. This works well around New Year’s; however, it can also be used at any point in the year.

Every year on December 31, the people of Woodbury gather in front of City Hall to watch the New Year's Eve fireworks light up the sky. However, this year, someone sabotaged the show by setting off the fireworks during the day, many hours before the event. Your students need to determine who did it.

This is a Google-compatible activity, and students complete all the work on the computer. This works well with distance learning, 1:1 classrooms, remote teaching, Google Classroom, or for online education.

Included In This New Year's Digital Close Reading Inference Mystery Activity:

➡️ Inference Mystery Google Slides: This 15-slide Google Slides presentation serves as the guide for the activity, leading students through the mystery with a captivating backstory, detailed evidence, and thorough explanations for each suspect's innocence or guilt. The slides are crafted to engage students and encourage critical thinking as they analyze the clues and find text evidence.

➡️ Original Narrative Backstory: Use this short story to introduce the mystery. Within the story are hidden clues and subtle hints, and the narrative will engage students' curiosity and initiate the mystery.

➡️ A Variety of Digital Clues and Evidence: Students will receive a variety of texts in different forms that include digital clues and evidence. Students must read the text closely and use their inference skills to analyze each of the clues. There is a newspaper letter to the editor, a social media post, a firework permit application, a fire chief’s schedule, a wanted poster, a text message, a fitness GPS, an invoice for a pest and wildlife control service, a poster for the event, and a letter.

➡️ Text Evidence Digital Graphic Organizer: Students will use the provided digital graphic organizer to organize their findings and evaluate the guilt or innocence of each suspect. This tool encourages students to support their conclusions with text evidence from the investigation.

➡️ Teacher Answer Key: Use the detailed answer key integrated within the Google Slides to efficiently review students' work and share the reasons for each suspect's innocence or guilt.

 
How The New Year's Digital Close Reading Inference Mystery Activity Works: 

• Use the Google Slides presentation to guide you through each element of the lesson. The slides will help you introduce the story and evidence to students.

• Share the digital file with students and allow them time to make their predictions and inferences and solve the mystery.

• Once students have made their final prediction, use the Google Slides presentation to reveal the culprit and go through each of the suspects to show the evidence of their innocence or guilt. 

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