Fictional Texts in the Classroom: Mystery

Literary genre whose plot involves a crime or other event that remains surprisingly unsettled until the conclusion.
Mysteries have the ability to get reluctant readers and writers enthusiastic about reading, thinking, and writing.
Mysteries often contain intriguing characters and are often able to hold a student's interest with their suspenseful and dynamic plots.
Mysteries are a wonderful vehicle for teaching critical thinking and deductive reasoning skills in an exciting and enjoyable way.
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/exploring-mystery-genre
Mysteries, with their intrigue, characters, and gradually revealed story line, hold the students' interest.
Students become involved in what they are reading because they use deductive reasoning and research skills to solve the mystery

Knowledge: Students arrange characters and events in the mystery.
Comprehension: Students classify events, describe characters, and explain precisely what has occurred.
Application: Students apply exiting knowledge to the mystery by illustrating, dramatizing, and writing their interpretations.
Analysis: Students analyze, categorize, and differentiate characters and events.
Synthesis: Students collect and organize facts fto form hypotheses.
Evaluation: Students appraise, argue, assess, and evaluate their opinions in the process of solving the mystery

Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Reference Information:

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/double-identity

Grade Level:

Themes

Qualities of Writing

The characters in this book were very believable. This is a critical part of the book because it helped the book become even more intense. The plot wasn't as realistic as the characters, but it was realistic enough that it was still convincing.
This book is appealing to both the boys and the girls in the classroom.
The author keeps the plot moving, so it is an engaging text
The author has very good descriptions of what is going on, including good details about the story (an aspect of writing mystery books that is important for anyone).
The authors language lends itself to allowing the reader to provide a detailed mental image

Difficult Components of the Text

There are a lot of different characters to keep track of.
It is an emotional book, especially for anyone who has had some family issues in the past.

Magic Tree House: Buffalo Before Breakfast by Mary Pope Osborne

Reference Information

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/buffalo-breakfast

Grade Level

Theme

Qualities of Writing

It is apart of a series which, if the students enjoyed the book, would encourage them to continue reading different books from the series
The characters were believable with their interactions with the Indians from the Lakota Tribe
Readers can learn a lot about the Lakota Tribe people and the information given about them is realistic
This book, and the other Magic Tree House books, would be great to use with science and social studies because certain concepts within the content area are embedded in the fictional stories. The non-fiction parts of the stories are bold so that helps students to be able to identify which parts of the story are fiction and which parts are non-fiction.

Difficulties of the Text

The only difficulty that I can think of is distinguishing fiction and non-fiction, but the bold text would really help students identify this.
A graphic organizer would also help organize this

Fictional Texts in the Classroom