Terry Van Praet

I thought that Mystery at Golden Ridge Farm was a thoughtful unit that incorporates the new CCSS, while requiring students to think critically, problem solve, and take ownership of their own learning. I liked that the unit starts off with team building activities and requires students to take on the role of a leader. I liked that it incorporates open ended questions and involves the community. Overall, these lessons are practical, educational, and relevant.

This book incorporates a fun and scientific way into a reading lesson that brings more than learning to the front with it. I enjoyed the idea that answers were flexible and allowed each child to see the end in a different manner than the others. This helps with needs of many kids rather than just one need. It helped with public speaking that I found was needed when I went into college and onto a career. This book did however leave out harder vocab and a deeper research of the story that is show more normally found in tests. show less

I'm not a middle-school teacher, and I suspect that I chose this book by accident (maybe meaning to click an adjacent book?), but I'm teaching a Sunday school religion/STEM class for high school kids, so this book's showing up in my mailbox was serendipitous.

The book is a set of lesson plans for grades 5-8 (or possibly grades 3-8 gifted classes), designed to prompt project-based cooperative learning. The setup is this: your local town has asked your class to figure out why local farm show more production has been dropping off. Some lessons are community-building/cooperative-work exercises, but most are clues and prompts for further (outside: library, Internet) investigation. Clues --and "red herrings"-- appear in the form of your town's newspaper articles and other documents indirectly describing current and past events that could impact the crops (or not). All told, it's a team-based integrated reading and research exercise that prompts real-life science research. At the end of the lesson sequence teams advance a theory about the crops and defend that theory in a presentation to outside judges (recruited earlier in the course).

I wish my kids were doing something like this. It's lovely, and as I'm thinking about my religion/STEM classes for the Fall, I'm looking at this book as a starting point for my own lesson-planning for those classes. show less

This is a great multi-week, multi-faceted project for gifted students grades 5-8.

Students are asked to help solve a mystery working in teams--- why has apple production declined over the last few years at a local farm. The author thinks of everything in this comprehensive guide, for example, suggesting a preparation where kids play team-building games at first, like finding a way for all players to succeed at Monopoly – sharing money or advice. And a cooperative exercise is repeated a few show more weeks into the mystery-solving project to refine team skills. The project is also carefully aligned to Common Core standards.

Here’s how the project works: Students are given weekly “clues” in the form of a “chatty” township newsletter, and the team leader (who rotates weekly) loosely oversees the process of students conducting independent research, following up on various theories derived by the team. Ultimately students must complete the project by making a written and oral proposal to a panel of adult judges, stating their theory and back-up research of why apple harvests may be in decline at this fictional farm. There is no single right answer (the judges evaluate students’ presentations based on the thoroughness and logic of their approach) in this open-ended project, but there is a cheat-sheet of sorts handed out to judges – to clarify the general direction the students should have headed.

Granted there is no specific right answer but the handout suggests that the production decline relates to increased pollution/pesticide/chemical use by the surrounding community, mainly associated with suburban sprawl and encroachment on farm land—a great real-life lesson for students. It also stresses that the residents are law-abiding citizens and no one would steal produce or dump pesticides. I am a mature student teacher, familiar with issues surrounding organic farming , who closely watched the clues as they were parsed out week-by-week, and I have to say it was difficult coming to a clear hypothesis based on the clues. The news articles mentioning various pollution issues in the town of one type or another was the indication mentioned most often, but not totally clear were clues dispelling other guesses that students this age might jump too. The fact that produce was not being stolen was only obliquely treated; according to the judges' cheat sheet, the author thinks the clues made it clear that the populace were law-abiding people who would never steal or dump pollutants but I felt the clues were much too oblique. For such a long and comprehensive project, I think students would become frustrated w/o more clear indications they were on the right track. One big gaffe is the fact that the Golden Ridge Farm is misspelled in the all-important map (misprinted as “Garden Ridge Farm”), also lending to unnecessary confusion in my opinion.

But in general, overall, the book is a very fun project that forces the students to think and chase down information confirming or disproving their theories. show less