Mystery Theme Investigation

This week in Totara 3 we are going to be doing an integrated mini inquiry unit around Ancient Egypt. To start of the week the students had to work out what our theme was going to be by solving a series of mystery challenges in groups. Some of the activities were more challenging than they looked.  Here is what they had to do.

Challenge 1
The students were given an envelope with 3 pictures cut into puzzle pieces.  They had to sort the pieces and then build the pictures.  The pictures were a hippo, an unusual boat and a symbol. No one guessed our topic.

Challenge 2
The students were given some anagrams to solve.  Once they had unscrambled the words they had to find each of the words in a wordfind.

Challenge 3
This challenge was a maths problem solving challenge.  Each team had a runner who collected the questions and then brought the answers back for checking.  Each time the team got a question right they were rewarded with a letter.  The letters spelt out the word ancient.

Challenge 4
The students were given the outline of a country.  They had to use a world map to identify this country by its shape.  When they thought they knew the country they came and got the flag to research and confirm.

This was a great cooperative challenge to start the term and most teams were successful eventually at identifying our theme for this week.