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
© Jeff Kroeze/Gallery Stock
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
In 1862, a man named John White struck gold in Grasshopper Creek in what is now Bannack State Park in Montana. Prospectors arrived in droves once news of the gold spread, and along with the prospectors came those hoping to make a profit off the gold rush.
But the spree didn’t last long, and even though some stayed behind in the town of Bannack, by 1950s, the place had been abandoned. Today, Bannack is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in the United States. It’s a “living history” site that allows visitors to see firsthand how quickly fortunes could change during the Western expansion.
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.