GEMS: Mystery Festival

This wildly popular unit features two imaginative and compelling mysteries, one for younger and one for older students. Students observe the “crime scene” then conduct crime lab tests on the evidence at classroom learning stations, analyze the results, and try to solve either Who Borrowed Mr. Bear? or The Mystery of Felix.

Many key content areas are explored, and the important distinction between evidence and inference is emphasized. Crime lab tests include thread tests, powder tests, DNA, chromatography, fingerprinting, and many more. Student understanding of science deepens as they experience the ways that science is like the process of detection.

Grades 2-8
10 Sessions (5 per mystery)
268 pages
ISBN: 0-924886-10-2