For The Youngest of Researchers--Where's The Info?

My mantra this past week has been an old one in the teaching profession, "Monitor and Adjust". My lesson with 1st graders doing research on animals was monitored and adjusted every day after each first grade class. I realized in retrospect that I went a little overboard with expectations for this lesson---thought we'd even get to a "wall-wisher" at the end of the lesson. (big-sigh) The first big ah-ah moment came Monday afternoon with the first of the 1st-grade classes when it was quite apparent that they cannot read yet. They are learning to read Mrs. Bell! Why didn't you remember that? I was briefly waylaid by the bells & whistles of technology and forgot to start at the beginning especially with beginners. My database of choice for animal research was Encyclopedia Britannica via SC DISCUS. It has an "Animal Kingdom" option that has the most user-friendly search I could find. It still was to hard for more than 75% of the first graders. Coincidentally a discussion on the SCASL Listserv last week was about animal research for young students. This led me to a resource that I'd never heard of before called PebbleGo Animal Database. I immediately signed up for a free trial (https://www.pebblego.com/UserLogin.aspx) and thought it would be great for my 1st graders. I didn't get the trial to work for multiple users though and am looking into the yearly subscription. (pretty reasonable $) Back to EB for the first graders and I changed my lesson to focus on finding pictures of animals to start with---learning what the words "images & media" meant and how to navigate the web page. That worked better, but it was still a struggle because the students became frustrated very quickly when things didn't work quickly or easily. Another insight...problem-solving is a technology skill as is patience and perserverence.