Read Write Think Animal Inquiry

This morning I'm taking my daughters to a little petting zoo near our home. They love to pet the goats, sheep, ponies, horses, and bunnies. Both of my daughters love learning about animals and they are both learning to write right now. Thinking about those things reminded me of a writing template hosted by Read Write Think.

Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template is an online graphic organizer template that students fill in as they learn about animals and or fill in from memory. It's a simple template that doesn't require students to sign-up or sign into any kind of account which makes it perfect for elementary school use. On the same page that you find the template you will also find some suggested lesson plans that you can access for free.

In this short video I demonstrate how to use Read Write Think's Animal Inquiry template.



Back in January Read Write Think relaunched all of their popular interactive writing templates and activities for students. Here's a list of some of my favorite RWT templates. 

A Simple Tool for Finding Related Search Keywords

Brainstorming lists of alternative words and phrases is one of the strategies that I have students use when conducting online research. Doing this before they start a search and or whenever they feel stuck can help them generate new search result pages that doesn't duplicate the results of their previous queries. But sometimes our brainstorming sessions need a little jumpstart. That's when a tool like Keyword.io can be helpful. 

On Keyword.io you can enter a search term and have a list of related search terms generated for you. These are different and more comprehensive lists than Google's default "people also search for..." suggestions. 

Applications for Education
It should be noted that Keyword.io is a service that is designed for search engine optimization and search engine marketing professionals. For that reason, you'll see a lot of ads for purchasing marketing products that Keyword.io offers. You can ignore those ads and just look at the lists that are generated for free. Those lists can help you and your students come up with some new search terms to use when conducting online research in Google, Bing, and elsewhere.

On a related note, you might also be interested in these articles that I've previously published about search strategies:

• How Excluding Words Helps to Narrow the Scope of a Search
• Five Benefits of Conducting Mind Mapping Exercises