The Mysterious Vocabulary Words

A couple of weeks ago, several vocabulary words mysteriously appeared on the back-wall of our classroom.
All of the words were related to ancient China:

oracle bones

Legalism

opposition

hardship

I mentioned the words to the students, and we wondered whether one of the ancient China groups was trying to get a head-start against the Egypt groups.

Well, earlier this week, the mystery deepened!

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I returned from lunch one day, to find this note sitting on my desk:

There were a number of excellent new vocabulary words posted on the wall, including:

abundant

elaborate

merchant

plentiful

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I was extremely curious to know who had gotten these words from the China reading!

I didn't know where to begin trying to solve this mystery. Fortunately Abbey, Kimball and Katherine led a group of students ("AKK Detectives", I think they're called) who examined a number of clues to crack the case.

An especially intriguing clue was the misspelling of "from" in the note (highlighted above). Was the mysterious vocabulary person careless about spelling, or had he or she intentionally misspelled the word, in order to throw us off the track?!!

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Finally, at almost the end of the day Friday, the case was solved: Jacqueline and Maeve had hatched the plan, posted the words, and written the mysterious note.

I'm not sure how AKK Detectives finally figured it out, but I sure was relieved when they did.

And great work, Jacqueline and Maeve, on leading us all on a fun adventure (while we also learned some new vocabulary words!).