End of Year Activities and Games Grades 3-4 - ELA Brain Teaser Fun!

This End of Year grades 3-4 fun activities and games ELA bundle will be a precious sanity saver! No-prep fun and learning READY TO GO! Most of the games in the 65 game packet don't even need to be photocopied. All answers are provided and no activity requires marking - woo hoo! You can pack your brain off on an early vacation. All this, and 30% off! Two freebies are included.

15 Mini-Mystery Stories
Grades 3-4 students love brain teaser mystery comprehension passages! They learn so much while being 'whodunit' inference detectives, including close reading, drawing conclusions and making predictions. These 15 mystery short stories can be fun carrots for the end of the day, morning work, or even bell ringers. Alternatively, you could assign them as high interest home study tasks for students who typically grumble about homework. These short stories, along with the mystery writing assignment, are a fun critical skills work-out!

How to use this resource
When reading the tales as a whole class, the most obvious methods of using these mystery whodunits are to read each one out loud OR to show them on your screen. The students then guess the solutions. If you want the students to work a bit harder, they could record and explain their guesses on the included worksheet, and write their own story, using the guidelines. The solutions are on a different page from the story and its question, so that students cannot see them accidentally; that would really spoil the fun!

Story content
The stories are humorous, succinct tales, many of them about upper elementary students. A few stories are ‘one offs,’ but some characters like riddlers Matt and Sophie, and Mr and Mrs Orange and their twins Pip and Peel, appear in more than one tale. The stories vary in length. Some are half a page, whereas others are a full page.

Included in this mystery resource

-- 15 vividly illustrated mini mysteries with clues included within the stories AND explicitly at the end of the tale.

-- An optional tips page, explaining the most common mystery/ riddle clue types.

-- An optional working page, so students can write down their guesses, and keep a tally of how many mysteries they got right.

-- A mini-mystery writing advice sheet, to guide students in writing one of their own.

-- A simple teacher rubric to mark the students’ own mini-mysteries.

65 Fun Grades 3-4 Activities and Games
65 fun, educational ELA no-prep games and activities for brain breaks and morning work are crammed into this grades 3 & 4 resource. Classroom community will be enriched and class spirit will thrive! This high-interest, paperless AND non-digital toolkit can always be relied upon for instant fun for early finishers, and transition time gaps. Perfect for when you want a sponge to soak up extra time that will also provide exercise for your students critical thinking skills!

Ready to Go!
Sometimes you need an instant filler, and you don’t have time to photocopy or even to upload anything digitally. These fun activities are all you need in a tight corner, such as Friday afternoon. Perfect for subs too! You can leave this package on your desk and walk away with confidence.

A few games in the collection give an option you could use if you DO have photocopying time, but none require it. The activities are perfect for developing or reinforcing classroom community and student bonding.

5 Activity and Game Types

1. Individual games. These are played by students on their own, with just the help of a scrap of paper from the recycling container.

2. Team games. These are played in pairs and some in small groups. Others involve the whole class at once.

3. Fun mini writing activities. Most of these are light, very short, individual pieces of creative writing.

4. Silly speeches. These are very short impromptu speeches on silly topics.

5. Riddles. Students listen attentively to mystery stories to work out the solutions.

Section 1 Content List

Here is a list of just the individual games. All games have an answer key! Most involve speed; the first person to finish is the winner.

Words of 4 letters that can be made out of the word ‘holiday’

Categories

Palindromes

Vowel-less words

9 words that can be made from Washington

The longest list of 11 letter words that begin with ‘e’.

The longest list of sports

Book titles and matching humorous author names

The longest word

Memory test

Scrambled words of jobs and professions

10 alternatives to ‘big’

25 alternatives to ‘said’

Top 10 lists, such as biggest countries in the world, the fastest animal in the world, most popular food and drinks, etc.

Non-rude parts of the body with 3 letters.

The preview provides peeks into most of the sections.

End of Year Readers' Theater
Both of these Readers’ Theater end of year fun mystery scripts for grades 3-4 provide high interest lessons in the last few days of the school year. Your students reading aloud, comprehension, critical thinking and writing skills will receive a B-I-G boost. Perfect for performances too! All of this, AND giggles guaranteed fun- phew! If you have a class that dislikes anything they perceive as "babyish", these amusing scripts, with their relevant modern characters, will get a thumbs-up.

-- Question sheets and answers are included.

-- Student peer and self assessment forms are included.

-- A teacher’s reading rubric is included.

-- Activities are included too.
-- 31 pages of content will keep your students VERY busy!

NUMBER OF READERS

The scripts are intended for 9 readers but the number of readers can easily be contracted or expanded, depending on how many groups you wish to have. The role list page suggests options for different group sizes. When the character tag EVERYONE appears, either the whole class can read the part, (usually something short and simple like “She scores!”) or a few students who don’t have an individual role can be assigned this group reading part.

PLOTS

In these scripts, 10 year old twins Sloane and Sporty need your students’ help to solve two mysteries on the last day of the school year. The first is set in their grade 4 classroom. An academic trophy is stolen, just minutes before one of the twins is to receive it. The trophy and culprit must be located quickly! The second script is set at the local baseball diamond, where cheating threatens Sporty’s team from qualifying for the Little League World Series.

STUDENT TASKS

-- Your students read their individual parts.

-- They read the EVERYONE responses.

-- At the end of each script, students use inference work to solve the mystery and write their ideas on an included answer sheet.

--They write short answer responses on each script, a long paragraph and answer comparative questions about the two scripts.

-- They answer 8 multiple choice questions.

-- They complete summer detection tasks, such as reuniting jokes with their punchlines, and solving two visual logic puzzles.

-- Fast finishing students color in the borders and coloring page.

DIFFERENTIATION This resource is based on a grades 5-8 resource, but this version splits the content into two separate plays and contains other modifications, such as shorter sentences. For a gifted and talented group you might want to use the more challenging resource: Readers' Theater End of Year Mystery Grades 5-8

List of Contents

Mystery #1 role list -- page 1

Mystery #1 script -- pages 2-6

Students’ mystery answer sheet -- page 7 Short answer and paragraph questions -- pages 8-9

Mystery #2 role list -- page 10

Mystery #2 script -- pages 11-16

Students’ mystery answer sheet -- page 17

Multiple choice questions -- pages 18-19

Short answer questions on BOTH mysteries -- page 20

Riddles mix and match activity -- page 21

Spot the differences observation activities -- pages 22-23

Mystery answers -- pages 24-25

Riddle activity answers and drawing activity -- page 26

Observation activities answers -- pages 27-28

Reading rubric -- page 29

Peer/self feedback forms -- pages 30-31