As I said in my previous post, I was involved in a writing project a number of years ago.  Today I decided to find those blog entries and read some of them.  One of them is my jumping off point for today's post:  https://kitandcaboodal.blogspot.com/2015/03/post-6-round-2-of-28daysofwriting.html.

Bear in mind that the post was written over 9 years ago, when you read what I have to say today.  I came up with a number of suggestions to improve the research stills of our students and reading over them, I realise that we have made little progress.  

First of all, I recognised that we need to work with primary students to improve their skills (and those of their teachers) so that they are prepared when they move up to secondary.  I recognise that I have partially succeeded in achieving this goal even though I may not feel that I have progressed far with it.  The grade 5s (year 6 in the UK system), spend part of their year preparing a topic for their exhibition in early May, and I work with them.  

This year the students accomplished the following:

1. Learned how a browser and a search engine work in order to better understand how to phrase our keyword searches.

2. Learned how to use some of the google operators, such as: the site operator [site:]; the range operator [air flights 1950..2020]; how to find definitions using [define:]; and how to search for particular file types [filetype:pdf]

3. Became familiar with keywords which would help them find statistical information about their topic

We also did some work on how to verify that a website/source was reliable and how to find images, charts, and graphs.

Having written this, I don't feel that we've done too badly!

(301 words)