Introduction

Now you've done it!

You are a member of a team of time-travelling researchers who've been in Victorian London for about a month, quietly doing research on the period, not interfering with your neighbors -- just observing. 

One of you, however, got bored. 

One of you HAD to go for a walk one evening and now that teammate has found himself accused of murder - the London police think they've found Jack the Ripper!

Now, at the very least, you must prove your man innocent -- or solve the murders yourself,  to free your teammate so you can go home together. You hate the idea of leaving a man behind!

So you venture out onto the streets, in period clothing and armed with your research, to mingle with the populace and try to find a way to help your friend. 
Only one man can help you, you're told. He lives at 221B Baker Street.

You've been in the city long enough to know that's the home of Sherlock Holmes.

Group: You and your team will research Victorian England by reading through links to samples of the Sherlock Holmes original stories and sites that detail the history of the Jack the Ripper case. You must have a good understanding of the Ripper case, as well as of Holmes and Victorian England in order to have a chance at a good grade for this project.
     Working together, you will research and write a literary pastiche based on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories.  (A pastiche is an imitation of another's style, often humorous, though sometimes serious -- always respectful!)
     Some of the plot elements have already been decided -- one of your team is caught and accused of being Jack the Ripper, and you hire Holmes and Watson to help get them off so you can return to your own time. 

Individually: each group member will write a standard 5 paragraph essay, to be read by their team and their teacher, in which they will detail what they've learned and what their participation and contribution was to their team. Also each member should keep a journal where research notes are detailed (with the source); and assigned writings will be completed and kept.
     Each entry should be dated and either written LEGIBLY or typewritten double spaced. Journals must be brought to class each day.

Remember:
Aside from the aspects of a mystery, all stories must have: 

1. A beginning, climax and resolution 

2. Illustrations and/or other supporting visual images 

3. Carefully constructed plot, characters, setting and conflict 

4. Dialogue 

5. Descriptive details 

At the end of the unit be prepared to turn in:
Your groups final story plus the editing versions so I can see the process you went through to get to the final product. Your individual essays and your individual journals
The writing process is just as important as the final product!

Read carefully through the scoring guide to be sure you know what you need to get the grade you want.....

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The Process

If you haven't already, it's time to assemble your team.

You'll need a group of no less than 2 and no more than 4 to fill a few specific positions.(Repeat after me: small group work is fun and will serve me well in the future.) 

One of you should take on the position of a Jack the Ripper expert by looking through the websites here and here to get a sense of the case, the suspects and the conditions of the crime. Do a character analysis of the Ripper from the facts you find. The analysis questions are found here. Think of yourself as an FBI profiler.

One of you needs to take on the position of detail master and go back through the Sherlock 
Holmes text links above to get a sense of the Victorian time period. It will be up to you to be sure your little details are correct - how people lives, what they wore, etc.

One of you needs to become an expert on Sherlock Holmes, the man, and read back through the Holmes links for clues as to how one might have hired him in order to help save your friend and teammate. You will need to print out this document, and fill in the information on a character analysis of Holmes and Watson.

One of you is the accused. How does it feel? When you go to the jail, what do you see? You could start here for an unorthodox take on prisons of the time. This is an okay place to look but you may have to find their information elsewhere to corroborate the story. Here is some interesting information on the early police force.

Remember! Journal notes on research needs to contain the source of the information as well as the information itself.

So, in order to get a sense of what world you're about to write in, you need to do some reasearch. 

First dive into a brief history of the mystery genre with information from the Masterpiece Theatre and their section on The Hound of the Baskervilles, a Sherlock Holmes novel. In your journal, do questions one and four on that page at the bottom of the reading.

Read the following to get other information:
Chapter 1 of "The Sign of Four" to get a sense of Holmes's drug use and the science of deduction. Chapter 1 of "A Study in Scarlet" to see how the two men met for the first time

Read the entire short story of "A Scandal in Bohemia" to get a sense of how women were viewed by society and by Holmes
According to what you know so far, is Bohemia a typical mystery story? Why or why not? Write a journal entry on this answer.
Complete a detective log  graphic organizer for Bohemia to turn in for credit. Download it from that site, either as html or pdf.

Time to compile the evidence:

Now it's time to put all your information together. 
 To create a structure for your story use the detective log pdf from this page. It's complete enough that it can act as a prewriting organizer-of-thoughts.

Periodically, all the Ripper experts will meet together in class to compare notes. As will the experts on the other topics.

You will be able to show others what you've found, compare theories, learn new things from your classmates.
 

You can attack the creation of the final project in several ways from here:

• One of you can take on the responsibility of doing the bulk of the writing, with the expectation that the rest of the group will act as proofreaders and editors. 
• Or, you can break your story down into parts and, following the outlines, each write a section.
• Your experts will need to go over the whole thing to be sure the little details are correct.

Remember: ALL these versions will be turned in for credit.

Evaluation

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Conclusion

Hopefully, this project has brought you closer to the art of the tale. 

     Through our time travel adventure you've come to understand: 

• how short stories, novels and plays are constructed 
• the craft of developing mystery, suspense and realistic details of plot
• And best of all, you will have learned a great deal about character or "what makes people tick?" 
• you also learned a bit about thinking logically in your mystery creation,
• you learned some history about Jack the Ripper and life in Victorian England
• and you learned to think analytically in deconstructing a mystery in order to build something new.  (your history and math teachers should thank me) 

What I want you to remember, that when you read, the picture your imagination can make of what's happening in the book is sooooo much better than any movie you'd sit down and watch.

 Give it a try, you won't regret it.

Almost all the Sherlock Holmes stories are online for your enjoyment
 This is one of the best places to start looking for both the original stories and the pastiches.

For you writer types....
 How to Write a Mystery workshop
 The Topic: Mystery not very stylish but this has some very good links.
 
 

I found great benefit in examining learning plans from other teachers of mystery work - as well as larger entities like PBS's Masterpiece Theatre.

Images within this quest are either my own, shot during a spring break trip to London, or are taken from the Stock Exchange website where images are offered for free.

Websites used in this quest are the following:

Permissions
We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is granted for others to use and modify this WebQuest for educational, non-commercial purposes as long as the original authorship is credited. The modified WebQuest may be shared only under the same conditions. See the Creative Commons Attribution • Non-Commercial • Share-Alike license for details.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Sherlock Holmes should be flattered indeed -- there are several novels and short stories out there that were not written by Sir A.C. Doyle but which feature the famous detective - this genre of imitation in literary form is called the pastiche. 

Pastiche's are not parody, but a "work in literature or art in direct imitation of another" -- (Chambers Dictionary) 

An interesting exercise for students, that combines research skills, writing and logic, is to create a pastiche of a Holmes story. Luckily the Victorian age is choc-ful of interesting characters that he might be set against. Most of the stories follow a similar pattern....

Holmes and Watson are at Baker Street —› A client arrives —› Holmes deduces things about the client from an object or the person him or herself —› The problem is outlined —› Holmes and Watson discuss the case when the client is gone —› The investigation begins —› Holmes identifies what happened —› Holmes explains it all to Watson back at Baker Street.

From Sherlockian.net: 
Holmes has been slipped into several mysteries of the era. 

• PRISONER OF THE DEVIL (Dreyfuss) (1979) by Michael Hardwick Sherlock and Co. are involved in the Dreyfuss Scandal; a Devil's Island Mystery
• TEN YEARS BEYOND BAKER STREET by Cay van Ash in 1984 he faces Fu Manchu; 
• 1975's  SHERLOCK HOLMES'S WAR OF THE WORLDS by Manly Wade & Wade Wellman he faces a Martian invasion a la War of the Worlds; 
• 1974 ADVENTURE OF THE PEERLESS PEER by Phillip Jose Farmer has him meeting Tarzan as he got involved in the Greystoke interitance matter; 
• 1978 saw SHERLOCK HOLMES VS. DRACULA by Lawrence Estleman; 
• 1979's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HOLMES is a send up on Jekyll & Hyde by Lawrence Estleman; 
• Holmes meets Harry Houdini in 1985's ADVENTURE OF THE ECTOPLASMIC MAN by D. Stashower; 
• and finally in 1979's MURDER BY DECREE by R. Weverka he faces off with Jack the Ripper. There are actually several Ripper confrontations.

When the idea for a Sherlock Holmes Unit came to him he found that very little was available, research wise, concerning using Holmes in a middle- or high-school setting. 

What Burkhart found was that more and more, people are finding that using mystery stories in their curriculum, Holmes in particular, seems to be “an effective way to introduce students to observation and logic.”

I decided to teach this unit because observation and logic are two things generally lacking in pre-teen and teenagers – two things that will help them in the future if they are going to succeed academically. 

“My search for relevant material went back to about 1940, but the usable material was published from 1980 on,” wrote Burkhart. “This indicated that Holmes has only recently begun to be considered a subject worthy of academia.”

Burkhart said he believes that Holmes is a relevant character in school – he never presents a theory without the facts to back it up. He bases his findings on what he knows already. 

“The connection between observation and deduction has applications across the curriculum,” he said. 

In "Sherlock Holmes Meets the 21st Century" Flack says teachers using a literary genre should consider mysteries – Holmes specifically because there are similarities between the "behaviors of a good detective or sleuth and those of a critical thinker and problem solver" (Flack, 15) “Holmes demonstrates that possessing a near encyclopedic knowledge base and being a student of all disciplines are two characteristics of critical thinkers” and he "believed in learning as a lifelong pursuit (Flack, 15)."

Flack, J. (1991). Sherlock Holmes meets the 21st century. Gifted Child Today, ??, 15-21. 

Kellogg, R.L. (1980). Sherlock Holmes and the educational process. Teaching of Psychology, 7,41-44. 

The unit can also help reinforce skills in areas such as: 

History 
Math (logic)
Social Studies 
Women's history

The intended participants for this quest are 12th grade Language Arts students.They are a mixed bag of skills and talents and should be grouped so that the uber intelligent are mixed with those that might need support.

Notes: You might make the stories more of a 'report' back to the controller in the future - you- and be sure to answer questions in that role if possible -- keeps the students in the correct mindset.

1.learning how stories are constructed and how to think logically and analytically in creating their own; 

2.learning how to handle historical research to come up with convincing plot details. 

Objectives: 
SWBAT read and discuss in groups the elements of a mystery. MSMS7, SJCO1, NCTE3, GLER2BST, GLER2CST, GLELS1A/BST 

SWBAT synthesize their knowledge about mystery stories by using the graphic organizers to write a mystery story that incorporates the key characteristics they have discussed as a class utilizing parts of speech, grammar and all literary concepts correctly. MSMS2, SJCO2, NCTE6/7/8, GLEW2DST, GLEW2EST, GLE2FST 

SWBAT listen, identify and work towards understanding and solving problems related to cultural and social issues in period mysteries. SJCO4,NCTE11, GLER1FST, GLER1HST

MSMS=Missouri Show Me Standards 
SJCO=St. Joseph Curriculum Objectives 
GLE=Communication grade Level Expectations 

This quest should take no more than two weeks, perhaps three of you're feeling generous. 

Students need to be allowed to meet, jiggsaw style, with other group members. 

All the Ripper 'experts' should meet together to compare notes.
All the Holmes experts should meet together....
The prison experts should meet together
etc.
If you are on a block schedule, and want them to do their work in class, you could tack on an extra week for time to write and edit their final stories.

Remind them to keep up with their journals...those will be very useful in their final writing. 
 

Aside from looking back through the quest to familiarize yourself with the websites:

Perhaps start the unit off with a screening of Masterpiece Theater's the Hound of the Baskervilles. 

Review good research habits -- how to create a bibliography and how to find good sources - not Wikipedia!!!!!

At the very lease: read and discuss a couple of stories from the original cannon.