Thanksgiving Trivia Research Activity (web quest)

I created this assignment because I noticed that my students have NO IDEA how to properly research items in Google. Every year I watch my students type entire sentences into Google and then click “images” to try to find the answer by looking at pictures. This just flabbergasts me! When I try to discuss this with students, they never seem to have a reason for why they do this. I wanted to teach my students how to actually research a question on Google.

I took 48 popular Thanksgiving trivia questions and ask students to
highlight keywords in each question. I instruct them to keep the highlighting to fewer than five words if at all possible (otherwise they would highlight the ENTIRE question). I then have students partner up to share and see if they highlighted the same words.

When we go into the computer lab I instruct students to place ONLY those key words they highlighted previously into Google and use the results to find the correct answer. They may NOT click images to try to find an answer, the must stay in “web” results.

Product includes:
Example page
2 pages of trivia questions
1 page answer key

My students really loved this activity and really took the techniques they learned into researching in the future!