The Private Eye School

More One-Hour Mysteries (Grades 4-8)

Mary Ann Carr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000489699
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

In this companion to her best-selling books , Carr presents five exciting new mysteries for student detectives to tackle. Students will sharpen their sleuthing skills after completing the course designed for great detectives at the Private Eye School, before moving on to tackle mysteries such as "The Vandal Strikes" and "The Great Electric Train Robbery."

Along the way, students will learn to analyze bloodstains and lip prints, while decoding messages and solving challenging puzzles. Each of these mysteries requires students to think outside of the box, organize data, take notes, make inferences, and use deductive reasoning skills. The mysteries include a teacher's guide and attractive reproducible pages for students to use in their investigations.

The Private Eye School also provides directions for creating a classroom learning center, in which students write their own mysteries, create logic puzzles, and sketch crime scenes.

Grades 4-8

THE PIZZA DELIVERY JOKE MYSTERY

DOI: 10.4324/9781003238874-4

TEACHER’S GUIDE: THE PIZZA DELIVERY JOKE MYSTERY

Introduction

The culprit in this mystery is a high school student who played a prank on a fellow student. The detectives in your class will be asked to solve this crime by analyzing evidence associated with the suspects. The evidence includes a school newspaper, a collection of business cards and books found in the suspects’ lockers, a soil sample from the suspects lockers, and a secret code.

To introduce the mystery, read The Pizza Delivery Joke Mystery (p. 54) aloud to students.

Solving the Mystery

First, discuss the following questions about the mystery with your students: Who? What? Where? When? Guide students to understand that the six employees of the pizza restaurant are considered to be suspects because they were the only people who had the opportunity to put worms into the pizza box. Hand out The Suspects’ Statements (p. 55). Read and discuss who had the opportunity to commit the crime. From this sheet, students should be able to deduce that Penelope Rodriquez and Franklin Hint had no opportunity to commit the crime. Hand out the Detective Notes chart (p. 56). Students will use this worksheet to keep track of the case’s evidence. Instruct them to record their findings on the chart provided.

Gathering Evidence

Ask your detectives to think of why someone would have committed this crime. What is the motive in this case? Hand out the copy of Learn More High School News May Edition (p. 57). Explain to students that the school principal provided this copy of the school’s newspaper. Ask students what they can determine about motive from this paper. They should deduce that Penelope Rodriquez has no motive.

Tell students that in order to obtain more evidence, detectives searched the remaining four suspects’ lockers. Hand out Evidence Found in the Lockers (pp. 58–59) and discuss. What assumptions might be made about each suspect from this evidence? Discuss who the detectives need to question in order to verify that their statements are true.

Explain to students that after questioning friends and family of the suspects, detectives found that each suspect’s statement was true. Does this mean that all of the suspects are innocent? Explain to students that more evidence is needed to determine more information about the suspects. Students will next consider the math paper found in the pizza box.

Solving Clues

Hand out More Evidence Found in the Lockers (p. 60). Ask students how this evidence might be relevant to the case. Students should guess that the math paper might be a code, rather than just math problems.

Hand out Math Homework (p. 61), which contains the sheet found in the pizza box. Why might the culprit have put this in the box? Explain to students that sometimes things are not what they seem to be, particularly with evidence like this. This is why it is important for detectives to think outside of the box and consider evidence from different perspectives. What else might this be other than a simple sheet filled with math problems?

After students have reviewed Math Homework and More Evidence Found in the Lockers, what can they determine about the suspects? They should be keeping notes in the evidence log. Discuss their notes, or let students compare their answers.

Then, ask students if they can eliminate anyone from the suspect list. Students should eliminate Wanda Wallace, because according to the evidence, she struggles with math. The code found in the pizza box focuses on math, so it is unlikely that she would have made up the math sheet.

Now instruct students to try and decipher the code. Direct them to find the numbers that are most frequently used in the problems in the first row. In the first row, 25 is the most frequently used number. Explain that they might try substituting 25 for E. Then, ask them try to figure out the sequence of numbers in these problems. (They should notice that the numbers are all divisible by five, so the pattern is based on five.) Ask your students, if E equals the number 25,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• The Private Eye School and an introduction to The Robbery at the Groaning Board Restaurant
• The Robbery at the Groaning Board Restaurant
• The Great Electric Train Robbery
• The Pizza Delivery Joke Mystery
• Stealing the Spotlight
• A Vandal Strikes
• The Mystery Learning Center
• About the Author
• Common Core State Standards Alignment