Sherlock Files: 100 year old secret

The Sherlock Files: The 100-Year-Old Secret

by Tracy Barrett

Grade level: 4

Notes                                                                                                                             

Great Stone Face Nominee 2010

First book in the series The Sherlock Files. The sequel is called The Beast of Blackslope.

Booktalk                                                                                                                        

Xena
Holmes and her younger brother Xander have moved from Florida to
London, England with their parents. One afternoon they are playing
their favorite game in front of their hotel, guessing people's jobs and
hobbies by getting clues from their clothes, when a
mysterious stranger presses a note into Xena’s hand, mutters “It fades
fast,” and hurries away.

Read p. 6, "What's that?" Xander tried to snatch the paper from her hand ...

through page 10, "The pub over there," the doorman said, leaning forward and pointing down the street."

Xena and Xander follow the note’s puzzling instructions and discover that they are not
only descendants of Sherlock Holmes but also the heirs of his notebooks
and his unsolved cases. Reading through the notebook of clues and cases, they discover one of the unsolved mysteries is still in the newspaper and people are still wondering what happened! A missing portrait by
an artist named Nigel Batheson, whose other works are being displayed in a nearby
gallery, was never found. Xena and Xander set out to find the painting and reunite it using their kid smarts and 21st century technology to discover the answer to the 100-Year-Old Secret.

This is a fast-paced,
entertaining mystery, with a lot of twists and turns and clues along the way - you can have fun trying to solve the mystery before the characters do!

---

  Sara Zoë Patterson, July 2009
  Some text from book covers, SLJ and Booklist book reviews

Google Lessons on Search

Some really useful modules on teaching search from Google educators: http://www.google.com/educators/p_websearch.html

notes on Millenials as learners from LESCN 4/1/09

Millennials:

• collaborate with their parents
• world is open 24/7
• pressured by work-integrated into home as modeled by parents
• enveloped in a world where confidence is emphasized, they are guided and secure: greater safety net
• hopeful goal + achievement oriented, civic minded
• inclusive: 31% minority, used to being organized into teams, no one left behind norm. As educators, we need to push more independent work so they can be self-sufficient learners as well as team learners
• read: Neil Howe Millennials Rising
• Parallel process + multi-task. Takeaway: instead of 1 task for 20 min, launch 2 tasks at once for 40 minutes (LH "have-to" day)
• Graphics BEFORE text. Graphic organizers integrated into lesson, always on the wall throughout, nonlinguistic representations
• Marzano 9 strategies
• authentic, real world context
• mutimedia does not produce lazy learners
• overview of learning in a graphic organizer that stays up throughout learning
• ask for feedback/give feedback/formative assessments
• let failure be ok, have to establish that as a culture in your classroom
  

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