Crime Scene Investigation: The case of Mr A. Pig vs Mr. B. Wolf

Originally written for a Year 5 class of pupils, this resource can be adapted across the KS2 age range. An adaptable letter tells pupils that they have been admitted into a police cadet training program and that their first mission is to revisit a case that had been previously ‘solved’ in light of some new evidence. Pupils read statements from the 2 characters before visiting the crime scene where new evidence has been found.

Each piece of evidence is presented with some notes that have already been taken by the inspector and room to add your own notes interactively underneath.

Learning from this resource can be taken in many directions including letter writing, story writing and report writing.

The letter contains examples of:

• Fronted adverbials
• Relative clauses
• Modal verbs

Also included, is a worksheet for pupils to produce their own file on a particular character including notes and questions and key evidence.

Curriculum links:
The purpose of the activity is to increase skills in inference and deduction. The activity asks them to deduce what evidence they can find and ask questions that will lead them to find further information. As year 5 teachers, we used this simpler case study in order to support pupils in finding evidence about characters’ personalities in a more complex text (in our case a Greek Myth) in which “all evidence had been destroyed,” aside from “one eyewitness account” (the story itself).

Other bonuses we found from this work was that pupils’ handwriting improved as a result of having a purpose - writing back to the detective. We also found that speaking and listening skills improved over the time while sharing their thoughts about the evidence with each other and then within the class as a whole.