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
© Frans Lanting/SuperStock
© Amos Chapple/Rex Features
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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In the late 16th century, the Spanish controlled the only road that connected Groenigen, Netherlands, to German cities across the border. The Dutch Revolt (aka the Eighty Years’ War) had raged for 25 years, and Dutch Protestant leader William of Orange (known as William the Silent) wanted to regain control of this vital passage.
So, he commissioned the construction of the five-pointed star fort known as Bourtrange, which was completed in The peculiar design was an engineering trick popular at the time – a way to give those within the fort better vantage points on attacks, and particularly to help defend against the latest warfare technology of the day: cannon artillery.
By 1672, Bourtrange had seen its final days of combat and gradually converted into a small village. Today, Fort Boutrange is an open-air museum, allowing visitors a glimpse into Dutch history and the strange evolution of warfare.
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.