Kid Detective Sipho Mashile

For a few months now, I've been using Shel Silverstein poems with my grade 5-7 learners. We've worked on reading aloud, comprehension, vocabulary, and rhyming. Things went pretty well, but I could tell the kids still "didn't get" what they were reading. The poems were meant to be fun and imaginative but the kids (and teachers, might I add) were taking them literally. So that sucked all the fun and cuteness out of Silverstein's poems. Ha!

This week I took a different approach with building comprehension skills. I wanted to have an lesson that actively encouraged the kids to "think outside the box", use their imaginations, and build the skills necessary to decipher the English they read into something they actually understand.

This is where Kid Detective Sipho Mashile comes in.

I searched the Internet for short and easy to solve kid mysteries. After "Africanizing" (yep...just coined new word) the character's names and locations, as well as simplifying the language, I came up w/ a cute mystery (The Mystery of the Broken Window) that would engage the kids but also encourage them to understand the story so they can solve the crime.

I set up 6 tables around the library (I call these stations, and use this method often). Each had a copy of the story and two questions. They had five minutes at each station to answer the questions, which lead them in the right direction to solving the crime (i.e. clues). Once every group made it to all stations, we came back together as a class to actually solve the crime. It took ALOT of acting out on my part, but before I almost gave the answer away, a learner figured it out! It was great!

The kids got into it, and I saw several boys who are a part of my "Too Cool for School" crew engaged in the story and trying to figure out the mystery.

Anyway, Kid Detective Sipho Mashile is going to make a recurring appearance during Library Time from now on.