Introduction

Recap last week’s lesson. What is a web browser? How can you move between pages on a website? What should you do if you find a website you think was wrong for you to be looking at?

 

Finding animal information

This week we are going to be searching for more information about creatures. How can we get to a website? They might be able to tell you about search engines as a way of looking for websites.

Explain in simple terms that a search engine is a clever website that can look through lots of other websites and look for (among other things) where a particular word is used. When we search for a word or phrase It then gives us a list of websites that have that word or phrase on them, usually putting the most popular sites (in terms of how many people go to them) at the top of the list. However, just because a website is at the top of the list it doesn’t mean it’s the best site for what you want.

A lot of websites also have a search engine built into them to allow us to search all the information in the website. Why might this be useful? (could be faster to find things, goes direct to what you’re after) Could it cause any problems? (spelling matters, it might bring up too many results if you search the wrong thing)

Show that we can go directly to a sight if we know its web address or URL. Again, point out that careful typing and spelling is really important, for example:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbc/ brings up:

 

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/ brings up:

 

 

Go to the site a-z-animals.com by typing the URL into Chrome.

 

 

If I wanted to find out about Tigers, what could I do? Some might spot the All animals A-Z listing link, others might see the search box on the page. Direct them towards these options if not. On this site the search box tends to bring up articles about the various animals (which are great) before you get to the fact files, so you can use that route, or you can go straight to the fact files via the All animals tab. The animals are listed in alphabetical order on this page.

There are several types of Tiger in the list, but here we've gone for the Bengal Tiger.

 

 

Scroll slowly down the page, asking them to just scan the page. What sort of information is on this page about Bengal tigers?

• Pictures
• A map showing where they might live
• Detailed information in paragraphs
• Quick facts in a table
• Links to similar animals
• Comments about the page
• Translations of ‘Bengal tiger’ into other languages

Is this a useful page?  Do they like how it is set out? Why?/Why not?

 

Safari Hunt

Introduce their Safari Fact Hunt sheets. Explain that they are going ‘on safari’ to do some animal fact searching where they will need to use the search boxes on websites to find pages for themselves. Remind them that it is really important that they type and spell words carefully and to ask if they are not sure. Once they find the correct pages, they will need to search and read them carefully to find the information needed.

They have two animal fact sites to use, both web addresses are written on the top of the Safari Fact Hunt sheets.

 

kids.nationalgeographic.com/animals         

 

a-z-animals.com 

 

Plenary

At the end of the lesson go over a few of the answers and ask how they found them. Which was your favourite of the two sites? Which one did they use the most? Why? Was one easier to use than the other? Why?