another reason my class rocks!

so i have been meaning to tell you this story for ages and i am going to do it RIGHT now!  

a few days before our october holiday, i had one of the most AMAZING mornings with my class.  we had a completely awesome "teachable moment" and we went for it.  it was so cool!

here's what happened:

we had been studying mystery stories in language arts and one morning, we came into the room and someone had written a note on our white board.  it was written above our classroom jobs poster that we had just put up which was made of colourful envelopes and popsicle sticks.  anyway, the note said, "i like this.  where can i get one?".  so, when my kids came in, right away they wanted to know who left the note.  i honestly didn't know and i didn't think much of it.  right away they were so excited and wanted to try to solve this "mystery".  i decided that we would run with it and see what they had taken from our mystery unit, we even skipped our math test!  i asked them what we should do first.  they told me we needed a list of suspects.  so we made a list...all teachers they decided.  next step, we need to find out where they were this morning.  what is their alibi??  we need to ask them questions to see if they want this classroom jobs poster!  we need to see what their writing looks like!

BRILLIANT!  how smart are my kids?!?  so together we developed a questionnaire:

1.  where were you this morning at approximately 8:00 a.m.?

2.  do you like colourful envelopes?

3.  do you have classroom jobs in your class?

4.  please write "i want one" here for me.

then each of my students chose a suspect and off they went to complete an interview.  how awesome right!?  i couldn't have planned this better i can tell you that!

after all of our suspects had been interviewed, we divided our suspects into two piles:  NO and MAYBE.  if they wanted to put someone into a particular pile, i had them explain to the class why they were making this decision.  we managed to narrow our maybe pile down to four:  mr. jeremy because he answered the questions in a funny way, ms. colleen because she had similar writing, ms. colleen because she also had similar writing, and ms. sharon because she wouldn't show us what her writing really looked like so she might be trying to trick us.  so what next 5A??  we need more evidence they told me.  ok, good call!  we split into 4 groups and each group was in charge of "spying" on one of the teachers through their door to look for clues, specifically what their writing looked like on the white board.  

our spy session ruled out ms. colleen and ms. cindy because their writing on the white board was too big and too small respectively.  but we still had two suspects.  we went back to class to discuss our options and review our interviews from the two remaining suspects.  hmmm....ms. sharon's alibi was that she was in ms. sam's room.  we had better check that out!  and guess what?!  ms. sam said that ms. sharon really was in her room at 8:00.  and that left mr. jeremy.  so the whole class when down to check out his white board writing one more time.  and it seems that we had found the guilty party! 

since my awesome class had come up with all the rest of this, i asked them how we proceed now that we had discovered that mr. jeremy had written the note??  they decided that we would lure him up to the class with the offer of chocolate (it was one of my kid's birthdays) and then we would interrogate him and get him to confess.  we sent two kids down to get him and prepared some "security guards" so that he couldn't leave the room until we had an answer!  

when jeremy came in, one of the kids, J, began.  he asked, "did you write the note?" and when he got no answer he started yelling, "i asked you a question.  did you write the note?".  jeremy played along and asked how he could prove it and after providing him with the evidence, jeremy confessed and the kids all broke into a cheer.  it was so funny and so adorable and i loved my class even more than ever for coming up with such a brilliant lesson for that morning all on their own!  when we finished they asked, "ms. emily can we have another mystery tomorrow morning?"  but i didn't plan this!!  i swear!!  it was all them and they are all AWESOME!