Conclusion
Predicting who did it, analyzing and evaluating clues, making inferences about characters and their possible motives, deducing from evidence, inducing from experience, identifying with protagonists of different ages, genders, races, and ethnicities, comparing cases and investigators' techniques, synthesizing all the information given to determine who had motive, means, and opportunity—these are all higher order skills that students will naturally use while reading detective fiction. And in this particular unit, students will also be exposed to different cultures and regions within the United States as we jump from urban L.A. to a seaside resort along the northern East Coast to the Virginia mountains to the Southwest's Four Corners. Hooking the students with a mystery that is bound to arouse their curiosity and then holding them with the challenge of solving the mystery before the detectives do, a teacher can have her students exercising their little grey cells without even realizing they're becoming better readers and thinkers along the way. Detective Fiction, precisely because it is often entertaining to read, is an ideal genre to break down the defenses of resistant readers and to get all students to enjoy learning.
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