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.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard:

2. Main Critical Thinking Question
© Michael Nichols/Getty Images
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. Main Critical Thinking Question
Yup. It’s a banana slug. This denizen of the North American Pacific coast makes its home primarily in coniferous rainforests, especially the redwood forests of California.
Zipping across the forest floor at 6.5 inches per minute, the slimy gastropod plays an important role in the health of the forest ecology. As a “detritivore” the banana slug eats many things that other creatures cast aside: mushrooms, dead leaves, even dung. In doing so, the banana slug acts as a living compost bin, converting the forest’s “trash” into rich, healthy soil.
And though the most easily recognized of the species have the bright yellow hue that give the slugs their common name, some specimens are brownish gray or yellow with spots. But we resist the urge to call those individuals “rotten banana slugs.”
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. Main Critical Thinking Question1 2 3 4 5
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. Main Critical Thinking Question5
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. Main Critical Thinking Question1 2 3 4 5
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. Main Critical Thinking Question1

8. Main Critical Thinking Question2

9. Main Critical Thinking Question3

10. Main Critical Thinking Question4

11. Main Critical Thinking Question5

12. Main Critical Thinking Question
This slide is a chance to summarize the information from the previous slides to build your final answer to the question.