Activity

Detective Pikachu: On the Case!

A clue-based mystery game that helps students practice past continuous verbs.

You need access to Canva to be able to use this presentation.
I made this game to loosely coincide with New Crown 2 Lesson 1, Get Part 1, Point on page 8.
It is used to help students practice the past continuous tense.

Hand out the worksheets and follow along with the presentation.
In this game, the class has to help Meowth find out which of his roommates has been messing with his things when he's not home.

There are three mysteries. Each mystery requires 5 student volunteers to be Meowth's roommates (the suspects). The suspects answer Detective Pikachu's questions using their mystery cards. I try to get different volunteers for each round, but it's not always easy. I found that it helped to let the current volunteers choose the next round of volunteers.

Here's an example round:
Read the mystery. I like to do a "listen and repeat" exercise here, so I read each section and have the students repeat after me. Now, hand out the cards for the first mystery to your first 5 suspects. You also need a Detective Pikachu volunteer. After the mystery is read, the next slide displays Detective Pikachu's questions. The following slide has the questions in a bigger font, in order for the students to read more easily. So, the game will continue like this:
Det. Pikachu: What is your name?
Eevee: I am Eevee.
Det. Pikachu: What were you doing when Meowth was not home?
Eevee: I was studying.
Det. Pikachu: Who were you studying with?
Eevee: I was studying with Charmander.

Then, you get a new Detective Pikachu volunteer to question the next suspect, and so on until all 5 suspects have been questioned. It doesn't matter which order the suspects get questioned in during each mystery. While they are being questioned, the class fills in the blanks on their worksheet. The worksheet contains the Pokemon's pictures, and their names in both English and Katakana so that they can be used interchangably without confusing anyone. Some students like to use the English and others prefer the Japanese names.

By the end of the questioning, one of the suspects will have a story that doesn't add up. This is the liar. I like to keep an overall class score, so points are awarded for volunteers and for answering the mystery correctly.

As for preparing the mystery cards, I printed mine and then used a glue stick to adhere the "Mystery 1/2/3" side to the Suspect side. You'll want to keep track of the suspects because they are different in each mystery - they're in order when the PDF is printed. You don't want a suspect from Mystery 2 ending up in Mystery 1. After gluing them I also laminated them but it's not entirely necessary.

Slide show: https://www.canva.com/design/DAE90X1tgBc/xINOA8Gc7KOTpoNhy_zBmQ/view?utm_content=DAE90X1tgBc&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link&utm_source=publishsharelink

I've attached the mystery cards and case notes worksheet as PDFs.

Files:
Small files
  • 2nen - Lesson 1 - p8 Point - Past Continuous Cards.pdf (387 KB)
  • Medium files (requires an account to download) -
  • 2nen - Lesson 1 - p8 Point - Past Continuous Worksheet (A4 Document).pdf (2.87 MB)
  • 14
    Submitted by hyogi June 9, 2022 Estimated time: 45-50 minutes
    1. CianaJ June 15, 2022

      Love this! Was looking for something exactly like this. Is there any way to make this into a .pptx file? I don't have internet in my classroom :')

    2. hyogi June 21, 2022

      Unfortunately when I save it as a .pptx file it gets converted into a complete mess and loses all of the moving images.

    3. cordeliant July 20, 2022

      Is there a way you could share this so I could make a copy of the canva file? Like so I could have my own copy on canva and edit things?

    4. hyogi July 20, 2022

      @cordeliant try this: https://www.canva.com/design/DAFG7vN_JoI/CKHclBApF_uW1kadPepgZg/edit?utm_content=DAFG7vN_JoI&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

    5. HTemple July 21, 2022

      @hyogi
      That link worked great for me! Cool to know that sharing canvas works like this!

    6. cordeliant August 26, 2022

      That worked for me too! Thank you :)

    7. joyceisachoice February 13, 2024

      My students enjoyed this activity a lot! At first I thought that having the Pokemon names switch between Japanese and English was too confusing, but I felt the students actually liked having to say/listen to the names in English. I used the link provided by @hyogi because the instructions were a bit more simple.

      The only feedback I have is that Meowth's name is written as ニャスー instead of just ニャス which sent the kids laughing for about 2 minutes. We had just done phonics comparing "s" and "su", so it was especially funny. I would suggest to change that for people who care! But not a big deal at all!!!

    Sign in or create an account to leave a comment.