Mystery Puzzles for Students

Do you need activities to keep your students busy? Maybe you have early finishers in your classroom or perhaps a few of your kids get bored with traditional worksheets. This FREE resource will challenge your students’ critical thinking and will make a great addition to your collection of mystery puzzles for students. You can download it for free at the bottom of the blog post.

How Do the Mystery Puzzles for Students Work?

There are a few mystery puzzles for students on the Growing Play website. You can check out the other ones that are listed below.

For this particular puzzle, you will need to do these three things:

1. SIgn up to receive the weekly email newsletter and other announcements from Growing Play.  If you are already signed up, please still enter your email.  You will not be subscribed twice.

2. Download the black and white puzzle.  Page two includes the solution so don’t peek!

3. Grab a pencil, crayons, or markers to solve the puzzle.  Color the whole page in when you are done if you want.

What Are the Clues for the Mystery Puzzle?

Look over the page with all the faces on it. Explain to the children that they will have to use their powers of deduction to help the policemen solve the case of the missing friend. Here is your case assigned to you by the police.

The police are on the lookout for a person who lost their group of friends. The friends described this person with the following characteristics: 1) big eyes 2) long hair 3) four teeth. 

Can you find the missing person in the crowd?

Set your timer and go! How quickly can you find the missing friend? In under 30 seconds? How about under 15 seconds?

If you are using this with younger students, you can try solving it together or providing extra cues such as where the missing friend is located (ie at the top, middle, or bottom of the page, left or right-hand side, male or female, etc.)

When is a Good Time to Use the Mystery Puzzles for Your Students or Children?

This puzzle is great to use for:

• detective unit in the classroom for students in an elementary school grade and older
• early finishers
• anytime the kids unplug
• adding to your secret agent play time kit
• a puzzle in an escape room style game
• enrichment activity
• siblings fighting? Break up the boredom with this mysterious case
• an easy different puzzle to try to challenge your students
• fun addition to homework over a vacation

What Skills Are Kids Working On with these Puzzles?

Puzzles are a fun way to challenge all sorts of skills. Kids are working on the following skills with the mystery logic puzzles for students:

• problem-solving skills
• visual scanning skills
• visual discrimination skills
• figure ground skills

More Mystery Puzzles for Students

Here are a few more awesome puzzles for the kids:

Detective Puzzle for Kids – Do your kids or students love to play secret spy agent or detective? Children seem to love sneaking around spying on people or completing secret missions.  Whether it be to save the World, stop a criminal or solve a mystery, pretending to be a secret agent is tons of fun!  This detective puzzle for kids is a FREE printable to provide a challenge for your secret agents. 

The Case of the Missing Diamond – Look no further!  The Case of the Missing Diamond is a FREE printable game that you can print and start playing right away.

Fun Detective Games

The Secret Agent digital download packet includes secret agent oaths, club, handshakes, secret codes, secret missions, handwriting analysis, lie detecting and more! Kids ages 5+ will love this packet to take playing pretend a step further.  FIND OUT MORE.

Solve the mysteries, remember the details, go on a scavenger hunt and more with this Detective Puzzle Pack.  It includes the following puzzles: word search, mazes, mysteries to solve, codes to break and more!

Illustrations by Semanche used under a Shutterstock license.