The Word Before the Word: Investigator’s Workbook Companion workbook to the novel · Case Closed, Sort Of · Open Files, Book 1

The companion workbook to The Word Before the Word: sixteen chapters of real science, math, history, geography and language, built around DET’s investigation into why things fall. For ages 10–12.

DET has a question that sounds easy: why is up, up? Over sixteen chapters of The Word Before the Word, he drops apples, hangs strings, times falling objects, builds parachutes and digs into history, and finds that the word “gravity” was never the whole answer.

This workbook lets your investigator do the same work. Every chapter pairs the story with a hands-on project in a real school subject, then turns the case around with private reflection pages. Kids don’t just read about DET’s method. They use it.

What’s inside (16 chapters):

•     Down on the other side of the world: a string, a globe and your city’s antipode

•     Magnets, and sorting what needs people to agree on it from what happens anyway

•     Words for the same thing in many languages, including Ojibwe

•     Pacing and mapping, plus a real border dispute that ended without a battle

•     Yeast, a balloon and a bottle: the history of something invisible

•     A bean that turns toward the light, and the slip angle of everyday objects

•     How fast falling things speed up, with the real math

•     A parachute lab, and what happens when you take the air out of the way

•     The hammer-and-feather drop on the Moon, and what a film can and can’t prove

•     The doors inside the atom, from ancient Greece to quarks

•     Checking that the Earth is round with a stick and a shadow, the way Eratosthenes did

Every chapter has three parts:

•     Case Notes: four vocabulary words, what happened, and questions with more than one good answer.

•     Field Work: a real project in science, math, history, geography, language or art, using ordinary household things.

•     Your Own File: a line from the chapter, then questions that turn DET’s method around. These pages are private. Your investigator decides who reads them.

Good to know:

•     59-page printable PDF, US Letter (8.5 × 11 in), black-and-white line art

•     Made to go with the novel The Word Before the Word. Read a chapter, then do its pages. (Looking for stand-alone workbooks? See the Investigator’s Field Manuals.)

•     Ages 10–12 (grades 4–6), great for homeschool, a classroom novel study, or a slow summer

•     Includes a case-file cover sheet, a word search, and a grown-up guide, “Things to Listen For,” with answers to the math and facts

•     One chapter takes two or three sittings, so the whole workbook fills a term

•     Your download includes both a Canadian edition (metric, Canadian examples) and a U.S. edition (US units and spelling, American examples)

•     Print for your own household or one classroom

From Perspective Detective Studios.

Observe. Investigate. Discover.