Scavenger Hunts: Searching for Treasure on the Internet

Web Site Review

http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr113.shtml

Sample Page of Questions regarding Penguins Around the World

http://www.education-world.com/a-lesson/hunt/images/hunt066.pdf

The Scavenger Hunt is recommended as an excellent way to start students in an easy manner in initially searching for information on the Internet. This particular site says it has three good goals. They are problem solving, improving reading comprehension, and learning to search on the Internet.

Teachers will find it is easy to create a Scavenger Hunt for any curriculum and age but if they desire, they can use the Lesson Plan site to find ones already made.

If you happen to start on the Education World’s Home page, click lesson plans, and the Internet Scavenger Hunts. This will take you to their monthly organization of topics to select a lesson plan. January alone had eleven plans but number varied for different months. From the Curriculum page, the URL that I listed was a sample lesson plan that I examined on “Ants Go Marching…Into Your Lesson Plans”. There were approximately 35 questions that varied in difficulty for different grade levels. The question levels were grade 2 – 4, 4 – 6, and 6 on. The URL’s were given for the student to find the answers.

To broaden the children’s experiences, Language Arts Activities were listed. One was an URL address to watch an Ant Farm and then the child could send an E-Postcard with two comments about what they learned to a friend.

Seven additional “Ant ernet” Resources were included. One was “Ants On A Log”, a tasty treat and The Ant and the Grasshopper,an Aesop Fable to read with a particular lesson to learn.

At the end of all the sites was the nice feature of all the questions being answered.

Scavenger Hunts are recommended as a whole class, a team, a review or a challenge activity. This is a comfortable way to help children begin using the Internet to search out answers to questions. It is a way to help teachers who are new at using the Internet to begin using it, also.