After digging for hours, the pirate only found an old boot!
Use this mystery prompt to see what ideas your students come up with about ‘what could have happened?’
Visual prompt and lesson ideas included in this post, read on!
Prep: Print and laminate the image below into a card to use as an early finisher task or writing center activity.
OR
Display on the board for a whole class writing activity.
Lesson Suggestions:
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’ helps.
For this prompt, encourage students to look at the images closely to see if they pick up on anything odd. There’s the wrong type of ‘compass’ near the pirate’s other tools; and the pirate is holding the map upside down.
Invite students to share their ideas with the rest of the class to discuss.
Set a writing task – Instruct students to pretend that they are detectives and must write what they think happened.
Remind everyone that there’s no right and wrong, otherwise there would be no room for creative thinking.
To develop this as a writing activity, you could extend it by instructing students to write a full story that may start with how the pirate found the map, the journey to the site, etc.
The below video is my original story that goes with this prompt. This is not meant to be a ‘correct’ answer. To help the puzzled pirate find the treasure, is part of the math mystery resource packet that goes with the video below.
Follow up your writing session with a fun mystery math session following the same theme!
Help the pirate find the treasure!
The Case of the Puzzled Pirate provides lots of place value practice and review! This is a fun activity to do at the end of a place value unit, OR, pace the clues to one per session as students learn the specific place value skills on each page. Each clue page will require place value skills to unlock a hidden message. The message will reveal important information that the students must use, with their powers of deduction, to narrow down a list of treasure location possibilities.
Available in different grade editions, click the links below to see what place value skills are covered in each:
