4th Grade Mystery Read Aloud Recommendations
Roxie and the Hooligans by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Frindle by Andrew Clements
Old Willis Place
Stumptown Kid by Carol Forman
See http://www.carolgorman.com for a summary, info etc.
It'll work for Feb - Black History Month -- see December 2006 issue
of School Library Media Activities Monthly which featured the book in a column and gave many useful connections to books that will
stimulate discussion about discrimination, civil rights etc.
Bunnicula by James Howe
The Mystic Lighthouse Mysteries by Laura Williams
The Gun Lake Mysteries by Johnnie Teitel
Deadly Waters by Gloria Skyrsynski
School Story by Andrew ClementsRoom One
David Almond's Skellig
Trapped in Death Cave by Bill Wallace.
Encyclopedia Brown
My students are all excited with the Encyclopedia Brown stories. We do some out of several books and the kids get together in small groups or 3 or 4 to solve the mystery. I can't keep the books on the shelf right now. My girls and boys are both having a great time with them. I can recommend the first and second stories out of the first book in the series. From Encyclopedia Brown Gets His Man (I think) one called the Case of the Whistling Ghost and another I can't remember (something about penguins in an Arctic museum) from that same book.
Bruce Hale's Chet Gecko series fills the bill with laugh-out-loud humor, puns and allusions to film noir. My fourth grade readers eat them up and they would make for hysterical read alouds.
Westing Game by Raskin as a longer, chapter read, and any of the Encyclopedia Brown by Sobel for stories that can be read and solved in a short period of time.
Betsy Byars has a series about Herculeah Jones with the girl solving
mysteries.
Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett
The Tale of Despereaux written by Kate DiCamillo
The Ghost of Fossil Glen by Cynthia DeFelice
The "Widow's Broom" went well with my students.