1. Teacher Guide
This lesson is designed to teach kids to ask a critical thinking question that you can’t just put into a search box to solve. To do that, we encourage them with smaller questions that search can help them answer. Make sure that you read the notes for each slide: they not only give you teaching tips but also provide answers and hints so you can help the kids if they are having trouble.
Remember, you can always send feedback to the Bing in the Classroom team at You can learn more about the program at bing.com/classroom and follow the daily lessons on our Partners In Learning site.
Want to extend today’s lesson? Consider using Skype in the Classroom to arrange for your class to chat with another class in today’s location. And if you are using Windows 8, you can also use the Bing apps to learn more about this location and topic; the Travel and News apps in particular make great teaching tools.
Patrice Berry earned a B. A. in Political Science at Swarthmore College, an M.S.Ed at the University of Pennsylvania, and is currently study college access and completion as a doctoral student at Temple University.  Patrice is currently the Academic Affairs Director at College Track (East Palo Alto), where she manages academic support initiatives designed to promote college access and college completion among first-generation, low-income students.  Ninety-percent of College Track students are accepted to college, and the college graduation rate is 2.5 times higher than the national average.  Prior to joining College Track, Patrice worked for the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at the University of Pennsylvania, for whom she designed and implemented college access and career readiness curricula.   Patrice recently married and now lives in Oakland, where she sings at local jam sessions in her free time.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard: Reading: Information Text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone (e.g., how the language of a court opinion differs from that of a newspaper).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning,.

2. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?
© Dennis Kunkel Microscopy, Inc./Corbis
Having this up as kids come in is a great settle down activity. You can start class by asking them for thoughts about the picture or about ideas on how they could solve the question of the day.

3. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?
Many insects have compound eyes, that is, eyes with multiple lenses instead of a single lens like our eyes have. Scientists believe the multiple photo receptors, or ommatidia, of insect eyes, such as the Asian tiger mosquito eye seen here, don’t provide as detailed an image as single-lensed “simple” eyes do. But what they lack in clarity, they make up for in coverage, allowing a much wider field of vision. Perhaps that’s why it seems like mosquitoes and flies can see a rolled up newspaper coming before you get close enough to do any damage.
Depending on time, you can either have students read this silently to themselves, have one of them read out loud, or read it out loud yourself.

4. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?1
Web search
How do single lens (human) eyes process information? 2
How do compound lens eyes process information? 3
Video search
Find a video that represent how insects with ommatidia see the world. Can you image viewing the world that way? 4
Thinking
What aspects of human life and insect life tie directly into the types of eyes both species have?
There are a couple of ways to use this slide, depending on how much technology you have in your classroom. You can have students find answers on their own, divide them into teams to have them do all the questions competitively, or have each team find the answer to a different question and then come back together. If you’re doing teams, it is often wise to assign them roles (one person typing, one person who is in charge of sharing back the answer, etc.)

5. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?5
Minutes
You can adjust this based on how much time you want to give kids. If a group isn’t able to answer in 5 minutes, you can give them the opportunity to update at the end of class or extend time.

6. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?1
Web search
How do single lens (human) eyes process information? 2
How do compound lens eyes process information? 3
Video search
Find a video that represent how insects with ommatidia see the world. Can you image viewing the world that way? 4
Thinking
What aspects of human life and insect life tie directly into the types of eyes both species have?
You can ask the students verbally or let one of them come up and insert the answer or show how they got it. This way, you also have a record that you can keep as a class and share with parents, others.

7. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?1
Web search
How do human eyes process information?
(Possible queries: “How do human eyes work” “how do humans see”)
Source: Live Science.com (
Source: WebMD (
Source: American Optometric Association (
In order to see, there must be light. Light reflects off an object and -- if one is looking at the object -- enters the eye. When light strikes either the rods or the cones of the retina, it's converted into an electric signal that is relayed to the brain via the optic nerve. The retina is the inner lining of the back of the eye. It's like a movie screen or the film of a camera.The brain then translates the electrical signals into the images we see.

8. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?2
Web search
How do compound lens eyes process information?
(Possible queries: “ how do compound eyes work”, “compound eyes”)
Source: David Darling Encyclopedia of Science (
Source:
A compound eye has a meshlike appearance because it consists of hundreds or thousands of tiny lens-capped optical units called ommatidia.
Each ommatidium consists of
a lens (the front surface of which makes up a single facet)
a transparent crystalline cone
light-sensitive visual cells arranged in a radial pattern like the sections of an orange
pigment cells which separate the ommatidium from its neighbors.
Individual ommatidia guide light through a lens and cone into a channel, known as a rhabdom, which contains light-sensitive cells. These are connected to optical nerve cells to produce the image

9. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?3
Video search
Find a video that represent how insects with ommatidia see the world. Can you image viewing the world that way?
(Possible queries: “Mosiac vision” “Ommatidia” “how do insect view the world”)
Some videos that illustrate what the world looks like through compound eyes can be found here through a bing video search:

10. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?4
Thinking
What aspects of human life and insect life tie directly into the types of eyes both species have?
Answers here will vary but some talking points here include:
What are some of human and insect activities that rely on eyesight?
How does having eyesight improve both human and insect life?
How does not having eyesight negatively impact both human and insect life?

11. What would life be like if human beings had ommatidia?
This slide is a chance to summarize the information from the previous slides to build your final answer to the question.