The crime was robbery. Someone had stolen the Wildcat mascot costume from a closet at Wood Oaks Junior High School.
The culprit may have been cunning, but sloppy. The thief left fingerprints and a slew of clues around the school. Solving the crime would involve the sharpest detectives with keen skills of deduction.
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Enter the sixth grade students at Wood Oaks, who took on the role of detectives for the school’s fifth annual Mystery Day on Nov. 20.
The students began the day by viewing a video written, filmed and performed by members of the Wood Oaks staff. The video included spots by sixth grade teacher Geoff Marshall, who was reporting from the scene of the “horrendous robbery.”
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“You are going to be detectives today,” Caroline Grebe, a sixth grade social studies teacher, told the students. “You are no longer sixth grade Wood Oaks students.”
Five different staff members were cited in the video as potential thieves and students had to deduce which one did the deed. The students looked at motives; shoe and fingerprints; fur and handwriting samples; and alibis.
Most of the students deduced the culprit was teacher Kim Leonteos. Said one student: “Her alibi was pretty weak.” The second most popular guess was Principal Rob McElligott. “His footprints were all over,” said one student.
In the end, the thief was Caroline Grebe. In a video interview with Marshall, Grebe said she wanted to take the mascot suit with her on vacation. “I thought it would be perfect for our trip,” she said. “It was a mistake.”
Despite the light-hearted nature of the event, Mystery Day gives students a hands-on experience with the literary genre of mystery, said Karen Fraser, sixth grade Reading/Language Arts teacher. The sixth graders are in the middle of a reading unit on mysteries.
