Start The Year By Teaching Search
As the new school year is upon us and I find myself not in a school for the first time since I started Preschool so many years ago, I was thinking about what I would be doing if I was starting this school year teaching a class of 4th graders (still my favorite grade). There would be all the usual ice breaker activities that teachers use to start building community in their classrooms and then soon enough the lessons would begin.
I would take the first week to try and build some skills and expectations that we would be using all year long. I believe one of the most valuable skills I can teach my students is the skill of search.
It doesn’t matter what the content is, what unit we would be in, or what other standards we needed to meet before the year’s end. What matters most is a foundation in search. I would teach search skills the first week and then build upon them week after week. This, I feel, would put my students in a place that not only would they be able to start learning for themselves but they would be building a life skill that is critical from now until we get chips planted in our brains that can read our thoughts and search for us (which I think would be really cool).
So in honor of all you teachers out there that are starting another school year, I thought I would create search lesson plans for you to use within the first month of school. Over the next four days I’ll be releasing a lesson plan a day here on my blog that you will be able to download in PDF form or make a copy of in a Google Doc to edit and tweak to your liking. I will create a lesson plan tailored for K-2, 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. They will be pretty generic in form in hopes that you will be able to adapt it to your school, classroom, or situation.
All that I ask in return is that you let me know via a comment, an e-mail or your own reflective blog posts how the lesson went, what adaptations you made to it, and if you changed it. I would ask that you share that lesson plan somewhere on the web for others to use as well. All the lesson plans will be released under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Google Doc Format
PDF Format
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Love this idea, thank you. I’ll look forward to sharing this with my colleagues and students!
I completely agree that we need to be teaching skills now that we reinforce week after week. Thank you for sharing.
Hi Jeff, Great ideas. Looking forward to seeing the 3-5 Lesson Plans.
Best,
Susan
Anxiously waiting…I won’t just use them with my students but as well as with teachers. Thanks!
[…] Reasoning […]
Great idea. I’m working with Grade 5 this week on a research intro.
[…] technology in the classroom. A series of blogs of his that I found to be very unique were about teaching search in the classroom. Utecht thought it was important to start building skills and expectations in a classroom right […]
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I was having a conversation about this very issue just yesterday – particularly with respect to students arriving at university without the necessary skills for research, and the need for universities to play a role in educating future teachers so they can pass these skills on to their students.
[…] been to any of my presentations in the past couple of years knows that I’m passionate about teaching search skills. Not only search skills, but how search can and is truly changing our world. Search has the […]
[…] Start The Year By Teaching Search […]
Thanks for the info. I am taking a course on librarianship and we are looking at teaching website evaluation. Your lessons are a great resource.
Looking forward to starting the year off right. Thanks Jeff
[…] challenge every teacher that within the first week of school to do at least one min-search lesson. You can find lesson plans that I have created to help facilitate this process here. By starting to teach the skill of search early on in the school year you open up a world of […]
[…] challenge every teacher that within the first week of school to do at least one min-search lesson. You can find lesson plans that I have created to help facilitate this process here. By starting to teach the skill of search early on in the school year you open up a world of […]