MURDER MYSTERY Debate English Distance Learning ESL EFL Inference Team Building

ABOUT THE LESSON

• This is a simple and controlled murder mystery. It is very good for ESL / EFL learners of a middle school or high school level. The slides are editable so that you can adjust the language/cultural references as necessary. I usually ask students to explain their reasoning and to keep their group discussion in English only when they are deciding who to nominate as a suspect in each round.
• The lesson also works great as a debate class, as at each step you can have students discuss who they think the murderer is- and why.
• In this game, students are presented with a murder, six suspects, evidence, and interviews. They need to look at this information and decide who is the guilty suspect.
• The lesson has 5 main stages: an introduction, 3 stages of evidence or interviews, and a conclusion.
• The PowerPoint slides are all you need to step your students through the lesson. There are detailed teacher instructions for set-up and suggested lesson plan in the first few slides.
• The Evidence and Interview printables are a wonderful addition to the lesson. While it may take time to prepare these, students love picking up each piece of evidence and feeling like real detectives. To add to the fun, I organize each round of evidence/interviews to be in sealed manila envelopes that the students get to rip open. It makes it feel like a real-life experience!

ONLINE, WHOLE-CLASS PPT, OR SMALL GROUPS

This can be played as a complete online PPT game, using the slides to communicate all necessary information OR you can have a hands-on lesson by printing all of the evidence for students to touch and discover themselves!

Additionally, I have provided PDFs for each stage of the evidence/interviews that you can send to students through your online teaching program at each stage of the lesson. Students can work in groups in breakout rooms or whatever group functions your learning program allows.

Online Lesson Procedure: After sending the relevant PDF file, I send students to their Breakout rooms (Zoom's small discussion rooms). They talk and make their decisions and prepare reasons. We then come back together as a whole class and discuss. This is repeated for each stage of the lesson.

ABOUT THIS FILE

• This zip file has six files: the PowerPoint slides, the Suspect printables (the suspect introductions and large photos of each suspect), Student Worksheet (in pdf as well), the Evidence & Interview printables, and an example of the relationship map that I recently did in Zoom.
• The zip file also has the Online Class folder: This contains the pdfs to send to your students at each stage of the lesson (The suspect dossier, and 3 stages of evidence and interviews). There is a folder that also contains the editable PowerPoint versions of these files so you can make any changes you need.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

• Suspect files are handed out to each group to explore and understand who the suspect are and what their relationships are. Large images of the suspect are included to use on the whiteboard when you begin the lesson and develop a relationship map with the key information needed for each suspect. (Thumbnail 3 shows the printable suspect files (and an example of a printed and laminated version- although it is my older version with different images))
• The Student Worksheet helps students focus on each stage of the lesson and the decisions they need to make
• The Evidence and Interview printables are a wonderful addition to the lesson. While it may take time to prepare these, students love picking up each piece of evidence and feeling like real detectives. To add to the fun, I organize each round of evidence/interviews to be in sealed manila envelopes that the students get to rip open. It makes it feel like a real-life experience! (Thumbnails 1 and 2 shows the printable evidence and interview files (and examples of a printed and laminated version- although it is my older version with different images)

RELATED RESOURCES:

• There's been a robbery at a bank! Have your students investigate and find the guilty suspect in my Union Bank Robbery Mystery Lesson!
• If you've tried this lesson, why not try my newest Murder Mystery? It is a bit more complex in language and details but follows the same style as this lesson.

ALL FILES ARE EDITABLE SO YOU CAN ADJUST THE INFORMATION AND IMAGES AS YOU NEED!