What you will need:

• A garden or an outdoor area where it is OK to collect nature items (may need to set rules about picking certain things such as flowers, or fruit fallen from a tree only).
• A brown paper bag
• Pencil
• Ruler
• Plain or grid paper to draw the graph.
• A timer

At the end of a math lesson I like to take a few minutes to share and reflect. Invite students to share their nature hunt results with the class by presenting their graphs. Encourage students to ask the presenter questions such as:

• Which item did you find the most of?
• Which item did you find the least of?
• Did you find the same number of any items? If so which ones?

The student presenting must use their graph to show the class as they answer questions asked about their nature hunt. 

I hope your kids enjoy this activity. 

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Engage and motivate your students to practice and review graph skills with this fun Math Mystery, the 'Case of The Greedy Gnome!' 
Students will be required to complete tasks involving graphs to unlock important clues that will help them solve the case. 
An optional video hook is available to set the stage to engage. 

Click your grade level to learn more about each resource packet. ​

Not sure what a math mystery is? Do you want to know more about how to use them? Check out the video below. ​​

You may also like to read this blog post
'Five Easy Ways to Use Math Mysteries in your Classroom.'

Still not sure if a math mystery is something you want? Try a full FREE math mystery available to download from my TPT Shop. The link will redirect you to where you can download the multi-grade bundle.  It is free to register if you don't have a login with TPT.

OH no! The city is being destroyed! What could be causing this chaos?

Use this mystery prompt to see what ideas your students come up with about 'what could have happened?

Prep: Print and laminate the image below into a card to use for an early finisher or writing center activity.
OR
​Display on the board for a whole class writing activity. 

There are plenty of ways you may wish to use this prompt. If you would like some ideas, please keep reading below the image prompt.

Lesson Suggestions:

• Present the image above to your class. Either show on the Interactive Whiteboard, or print and hang somewhere. If using as an early finisher activity, print and laminate these images as cards. 
• Either brainstorm as a class or instruct students to think about what could have happened in the image scene. Setting a timer for 'thinking time' is recommended. 
• Invite students to share their ideas with the rest of the class. Remind students that there are no 'right' or 'wrong' answers. This prompt is to invite creative thinking.
• Set a writing task to follow the discussion. Instruct students to pretend they are detectives and must write what they think happened. 
• A simple print and go template for this writing task can be downloaded below. Otherwise you could just use plain lined paper or workbooks to carry out the writing activity. ​​
  

Remind everyone that there's no right and wrong, otherwise there would be no room for creative thinking in this task.

• To develop this as a writing activity, you could extend it by having your students work towards writing a full story around this crime scene. To do this, I would break sessions into 'creating characters,' 'describing the setting' and what happened in the lead up to the crime scene. ​​

Now, I think it is only fair for students to find out what actually happened. Did anyone use the dragons in the image as part of their story? The dragons forms the main part of my story idea.
The below video is my original story that goes with this prompt. This is in no way a 'correct' answer, just an example of the story building to something else with lots of extra detail beyond the image prompt.
​
You may wish to skip this option.

• ​After viewing the video, discuss if anyone had any similar ideas in their stories. Do a compare and contrast session with the story above and what students wrote.
• Further extend this mystery activity by instructing students to rewrite their mystery story using the ideas from the video. Create dragon characters and figure out which dragon is the guilty one for causing the chaos.

You may have noticed the 'Math Mystery' tag in the video, and that is because this case can be further resolved and integrated with a math activity if you wish. 

Solve the case! Which Dragon is causing the division?
If you are interested in extending this mystery activity by integrating it with your math lesson and giving your students lots of division math practice and review, click on your grade level below to find the file case  on my Teachers Pay Teachers store. Each of the five math pages will require students to complete math involving division to unlock clues. Be sure to check out the product description to see the specific division skills covered in that grade version. 

Not sure what a math mystery is? Do you want to know more about how to use them? Check out the video below. ​​

You may also like to read this blog post
'Five Easy Ways to Use Math Mysteries in your Classroom.'

Still not sure if a math mystery is something you want? Try a full FREE math mystery available to download from my TPT Shop. The link will redirect you to where you can download the multi-grade bundle.  It is free to register if you don't have a login with TPT.
CLICK HERE to find in my TPT store. ​

Subscribe to my newsletter to find out when new mystery prompts are added to this section of my website. The newsletter will also announce any special giveaways, flash freebies, sales, free stuff, plus new blog posts and resources. You can unsubscribe at any time. 

Last week I posted a new logic puzzle to solve. As promised, this week I will show the answers along with a solution guide.

Were you able to solve it? Did you find it easy, hard, or just the right amount of challenge? If using in the classroom, how did your students find it? 

Either way, as simple as it looks, this was a challenging puzzle that required a fair bit of problem solving. In case there was any struggle with this challenge, I've included a solution strategy guide for solving this particular puzzle.

The first clue states that Little Red bought flowers for Molly the Mouse. So we can mark 'YES' to connect Little Red to Molly Mouse and cross out the other possibilities in that column and row for the other characters.  

The second clue, 'the tulips were bought to say a special 'thank you' to someone', tells us that Tulips and thank will be a combo that go together. But, we cannot make any markings yet, we need more information. So just try and remember this for now. 

The third clue, 'Snow White received flowers as a 'get well' gift.' We still cannot make any more markings at this stage, except now we know from the previous clue,  that Snow White didn't receive Tulips, because Tulips were given to say 'thank you' and Snow White received flowers to say 'get well.' So just keep this information in mind again for later. 

The fourth clue, 'Larry the Wizard bought flowers for someone's birthday." This clue paired with the two clues above helps make some deductions. First, mark yes for  Larry and the reason 'birthday, and cross out the rest of that row and boxed column. 

Look back at the previous two clues we couldn't make markings on, we now can cross eliminate the possibility that Larry bought Tulips, since they were a 'thank you' not birthday. We can also cross off 'Snow White' as the recipient, because she received flowers to get well, not her birthday.

After removing those possibilities, suddenly we are reduced to only one empty box in the recipients section for Larry and Nivens McTwisp. If Larry couldn't have bought flowers for Molly or Snow White, then we can conclude that he must've bought flowers for Pinocchio.  
Then, if Larry bought flowers for Pinocchio and Little Red bought flowers for Molly, the last pair to match up is Nivens McTwisp with Snow White.  (See circled sections in the image above). 

Using the earlier clues where we couldn't cross off anything, suddenly allows us to make more markings with the new information discovered. 
- Snow white received flowers to get well, so now that we know that Nivens McTwisp bought the flowers for her, we can mark 'YES' for that reason in Nivens McTwisp's column.
- We also know that Tulips were given as a 'thank you,' so we can eliminate tulips as being the flower gift from Nivens to Snow.

After crossing out those possibilities, a new piece of information shines in the flower section. If neither Larry or Nivens bought the tulips, then we can say that Little Red bought the tulips.  This stays true to the clue that the tulips were a 'thank you' gift because it is the last possibility remaining

The fifth clue helps complete the last bit of the puzzle, 'Nivens didn't buy the daisies.' Since we have already figured out that Little Red bought the tulips, it leaves Larry who bought the daisies. Therefore, it leaves Nivens with the roses. 

​Yay! Puzzle complete! Did you get the same results?

Thank you for using this puzzle. I hope it was fun and challenging. I plan to make more; maybe even some that are more challenging too. Subscribe to my newsletter or follow my TPT store to stay updated when new resources are available. 

​Download this FREE logic puzzle to print and complete, or give to your students, HERE.