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 the Microsoft Educator Network.
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, take a Skype lesson on today’s topic, or invite a guest speaker to expand on today’s subject. And if you are using Windows 8, the panoramas in the MSN Travel App are great teaching tools. We have thousands of other education apps available on Windows here.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard:

2. Insert Main Critical Thinking Question
© Jim Richardson/Getty Images
© Frans Lanting/SuperStock
© Steven Gnam/Tandem Stills + Motion
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.

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Humans no longer live year-round on Hirta. The Scottish island is part of the St Kilda archipelago, a remote group of islands in the Atlantic Ocean, a good 40 miles from the next-closest island, North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides.
Hirta, and specifically, Village Bay (seen here) were evacuated in Though the Scottish residents of Hirta had learned, over centuries, to eke out a living on the island, several factors led the people to request evacuation to the mainland.
During World War I, Hirta was a strategic base for the British Navy, and the influx of outsiders changed the way the local population viewed their island. Subsequent crop failures, and an outbreak of influenza, led the people of Village Bay to depart for good, leaving the island to seabirds and a small flock of Soay sheep.
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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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This slide is a chance to summarize the information from the previous slides to build your final answer to the question.