This Lesson Gets Students Curious About The Great Gatsby

The first time I taught The Great Gatsby, I didn't do it well. I was a new teacher, and I still thought students would become passionate about a book if I was passionate about the book.

I thought they would understand the book if I simply explained it to them. I didn't yet really understand Bloom's Taxonomy or cognitive load.

I went on to teach The Great Gatsby every year the next seven years. Fortunately, it's a hard book to hate.

The prose are stunning, the themes are still just as relevant today, but I did find that the better you know a book, the more difficult it can be to see it through the fresh eyes of a high school ELA student when they meet The Great Gatsby for the first time.

What is the Great Gatsby Murder Mystery Activity?

After iterating year after year, a colleague and I hit on an idea that exceeded our expectations. We created a Gatsby Murder Mystery Activity to introduce the novel.

The mystery is inspired by Clue and thus includes potential suspects, weapons, and crime scenes. It's a stealthy way to really introduce characters, symbolic objects, and settings from The Great Gatsby.

Students analyze the clues provided. They read quotes from the book about each person and place, and they try to predict who will murder whom, where, and with what by the end of the book.

If they happen to already know how the story ends, their challenge is to come up with an alternate ending. There are, of course, no spoilers allowed.

Why This Lesson Works

If you have read and/or taught The Great Gatsby, you know that the prose are both beautiful and challenging. It can be overwhleming to teenagers trying to just figure out the who, what, when, and where underthing the complex language.

This is why Gatsby is one of those books that can overhwelm a student's cognitive load when they first read it. I realized after trying out our fun murder activity, that The Great Gatsby Murder Mystery does more than just energize studentss or get them curious. It lightens the cognitive load.

If students already know the characters, settings, and objects in the novel, they have something to hold onto as they beat against the current of Fitzgerald's story (see what I did there?).

The Current Edition

After years of teaching The Great Gatsby in high school and perfecting the design, I now have character profiles, setting images, and an assignment sheet to guide students through the activity, but I don't get to use it anymore in my own classroom.

After those first eight years, I moved on to different grades of ELA at different schools. This is why it makes me so happy to see reviews on Teachers Pay Teachers that let me know my introduction to The Great Gatsby is still out there making a difference to teachers and their students.

If you're interested, you can purchase it as a standalone activity or in a bundle of other Gatsby lessons.