Back to School Team Building Activity - Close Reading Digital Inference Mystery

In this back to school digital inference mystery, your students will solve this close reading mystery as they analyze text evidence, make inferences, and think critically to uncover the culprit! This is a fun way to challenge students to look for text evidence, infer information, and read more closely as they attempt to determine who stole books from the classroom library. The digital resource includes everything you need to facilitate the back to school activity in your classroom. It works great as a back to school activity, but can also be used within the classroom at any point!

While adding more books from her personal collection to her popular classroom library, Ms. Ramirez is surprised to discover that six of her beloved books are mysteriously missing from the shelves. It's up to your students to use their close reading and inference skills to figure out who stole them!

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 Digital Back to School Inference Mystery:

➡️ Back to School Mystery Google Slides Presentation: A 19-slide Google Slides presentation that guides students through the backstory, key evidence, the final reveal, and detailed explanations of why each suspect is innocent or guilty.

➡️ Original Narrative Backstory: Use this short story to set up and initiate the mystery, with clues hidden within the text!

➡️ A Variety of Digital Clues and Evidence: Students must analyze and infer from multiple forms of digital evidence, including a book drive fundraiser poster, a library late notice, a letter, an email, a book club sign-up sheet, a text message, and a teacher social media group.

➡️ Back to School Mystery Digital Graphic Organizer: A structured digital space for students to track their findings, organize their reasoning, and eliminate suspects based on evidence.

➡️ Teacher Answer Key: Provided in both single-slide format and within the slideshow, making it easy to review students’ reasoning and conclusions.

How to use this DIgital Back to School Team Building Activity: 

• Decide whether you want students to work in partners, groups, or independently for this back to school inference mystery.
• 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.

What Teachers Are Saying About this Back to School Inference Mystery:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ My students had a lot of fun with this activity! It was very easy to use.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ So much fun! Very engaging for kids and a great teamwork building, back to school activity for my new classes. It was so successful I snapped up a few more and am using another next week as an intro to our new mystery novel/unit we're beginning. Thanks so much!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Another excellent and engaging resource by Presto Plans. Can't go wrong using their resources!

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