Thanksgiving Close Reading Digital Inference Mystery – Who Kidnapped the Turkey?

Engage your students with a captivating Thanksgiving close reading digital inference activity that challenges them to find text evidence, make inferences, and read more closely. This resource includes everything you need to facilitate a fun and creative Thanksgiving mystery in a digital format. Students can work collaboratively or independently as they strengthen their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills while unraveling the mystery together.

Clyde Bartlett is hosting the family Thanksgiving dinner, and this year he has been bragging nonstop about serving his prized turkey, Titan—the biggest turkey in all of Maple Hollow. But two days before the holiday, Titan mysteriously disappears. Someone has kidnapped Titan, and it’s up to your students to determine who is the most likely culprit.

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

Included in This Digital Thanksgiving Close Reading Inference Mystery:

➡️ 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 clear 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 support their ideas with text evidence.

➡️ Digital Poster: Introduce the mystery with a visually appealing digital poster designed to grab students’ attention. Use it to set the stage, establish the stakes, and draw students into the investigation ahead.

➡️ Original Digital Narrative Backstory: Use this short story to launch the mystery. Hidden within the narrative are clues and subtle hints that invite students to read closely, make inferences, and begin forming predictions about who might have taken Titan.

➡️ A Variety of Digital Clues and Evidence: Students examine a wide range of digital texts that contain important clues. They must read each one closely and use their inference skills to analyze the information. The evidence set includes a social media group chat, a poster, a newspaper article, an animal control incident report, an email conversation, a text message thread, a set of therapist notes, and a social media profile.

➡️ Text Evidence Digital Graphic Organizer: Students use the digital graphic organizer to track their findings and evaluate the guilt or innocence of each suspect. This tool helps them organize their thinking and encourages them to back up every conclusion with clear text evidence from the investigation.

➡️ Teacher Answer Key: Use the detailed answer key, available both in slide format and embedded within the teacher version of the presentation, to quickly review students’ work. The key explains the reasoning behind each suspect’s innocence or guilt, making whole-class discussion and debriefing easy and effective.

How the Digital Thanksgiving Close Reading Inference Mystery Works:

• Put students in small groups so they can collaborate and work together to solve the mystery.
• Use the Google Slides presentation to guide you through each part of the Thanksgiving activity. The slides will help you introduce the backstory and each piece of evidence to the class or to individual groups.
• Share the student slides with all the digital evidence and give students time to make predictions, analyze clues, and use inference skills to determine who kidnapped Titan.
• Once each group has made their final prediction, use the Google Slides to reveal the culprit and walk through each suspect, showing the text evidence that proves their innocence or guilt.

If you like this, you’ll love this resource:

>>> The Reading Mysteries Program

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