Mystery Unit Culminating Celebration…

I was approached by one of my fourth grader teachers. She was looking for an activity for her students to celebrate the end of their Mystery Unit in ELA. The students learned vocabulary like: mystery, crimeculpritevidence, etc. They started to write their own mystery story using the vocabulary. At the end of the unit, she was asking for some way to have the students solve an online mystery. I tried to “flip the script” and asked, “What if the students created their own mystery Breakout EDU online?”

She was intrigued by the idea and took it back to her team. Next thing you know, I have four teachers wanting to do this with their students. So I created an example Breakout (hopefully embedded below), then came into each class had the students try mine and then showed them how they would be able to create their own, single lock, mystery breakout.

For many students, there were several attempts of submitting and returning for revisions (with directed feedback from me). After several days, some were starting to get approved and I was able to push those out to all the fourth graders to complete in their class library. Reflecting after this activity as well as looking for a project to work on during our monthly PLC’s (professional learning communities; basically self-directed PD where my selected focus this year is HyperDocs) I decided to turn this into a student HyperDoc walking them through the planning, designing, and creating process with the hope to implement with next year’s fourth graders. Embedded below is what I came up with, if you would like your own copy click this link, then click ‘Use Template’ in the top right.

If you have been asked to develop a culminating activity/celebration at the end of a unit of study, what have you had the students do? I would love to learn/read about it in the comments below.

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