Scholarly Inquiry

I remember learning about rocks in grade 3. This topic is a basis for what my activity is to teach students how to effectively research.

Searching things has never been a problem for me. As a child there were no restrictions set on my internet browser, but I also never went on websites that I didn't know. There's always talk about making the internet safe for children, and that includes what can be searched on the internet. Nowadays anyone can post anything on the internet without any censor or editing, thus making some information on the internet illegitimate. With their minds still developing, children might not necessarily know what to sort through and decide what is truthful and useful for them to use. As a future teacher, I would want to teach my students the right way to search for information on the internet, so as to avoid any confusion or unsafe websites that they can stumble upon.

My hypothetical scenario for teaching my grade 3 students how to do research for their project:

- I will first instruct a basic lesson on how to effectively search. This includes using correct spelling, keywords, and using different words that are related to the subject. After doing so, each student will pair up and take turns using the computer on the next activity.

- The topic will be on the different types of rocks. Using the websites provided for us as a safe search for kids, for example http://www.kidsclick.org/, kids will go onto the site and I will have made a "scavenger hunt" of sorts for them to complete before the end of class.

- This scavenger hunt is a list of things to search for, and every question will use information required for the previous question. For example, the first question is: "What are the different types of rocks?" and the second is: "What is Sedimentary?"

- If the students cannot find information on a certain engine, they will be encouraged to use other search engines to find the answer. I will have hints as to what websites to focus on, such as: "Psst! CyberSleuth would be a good engine to use for this question."

This gives them the liberty to explore the different search engines and discover what websites are good for information and which are good for resources such as pictures or videos.