Digital Scavenger hunt: Tourism NZ

WALT: combine our reading and smart searching skills to quickly find information

This lesson aimed to teach learners about the importance of being a smart searcher. We began by unpacking what it means to be a smart searcher, and how we use reading skills when we are looking for information. Then, we co-constructed a Success Criteria, which helped to guide students during the scavenger hunt task.

Click here to view the extended plan .

Lesson reflection:

Overall I felt this lesson went successfully. Through the fun context of a digital scavenger hunt, students were practising their smart searching skills and using reading skills to find information in a passage. The previous week students took part in a digital scavenger hunt about ANZAC day, and students loved it. While some students did really well, I noticed that some students really struggled. This led me to realise that the students would benefit from thinking about smart searching, and how this could help them to all find infomration quickly.

WALT and SC: Students were able to easily articulate what they thought it meant to be a smart searcher. This made it easy for them to come up with their own success criteria. Some students were able to easily use these ideas during the scavneger hunt task, whilst others needed to be reminded. We were able to look back to our SC to check whether the students Google Searches fit the criteria.

Collaboration: It was interesting that the students felt that collaboration and teamwork was an important element for success. Collaboration is something we focussed a lot on last term, so it is great to hear the students talking about why collaboration is important for students learning.

Gaps in reading knowledge: This is also a lesson that I completed with the rest of the classroom. Something interesting I found was that students actually struggled to locate the relevant information on the page. This tells me that during reading I will need to focus on literal questions, where students have to carefully think about what the question is asking, and how they can find the answer in the text they are reading. This also ties into the skill of skimming and scanning. I noticed that not all students fully understand how to skim and scan, and how to use this skill when trying to find information on the page. This task was a great opportunity to discover that some of my students need to learn about the difference between literal and inference questions, and how to find and answer literal questions.

Extra footage

Unpacking the WALT

Here we discussed what smart searching is and how it can help students to quickly find information. We also shared ideas about what reading skills were needed in order to successfully complete the scavenger hunt

Scavenger hunt

Here the students worked in pairs to complete the scavenger hunt task. This gives you an idea of how the students collaborated and used smart searching skills. As you can see, my students love scavenger hunt tasks and are completely engaged.