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:

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© Frans Lanting/SuperStock
© Michael Dietrich/Alamy
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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Happy Groundhog Day! Here’s an alpine marmot to help us celebrate. While it’s no groundhog, the alpine marmot is an extraordinary creature. As the name suggests, this species of marmot is found in the grassy meadows and rocky slopes of the Alps, but there are also populations in the Carpathians, Pyrenees, and Tatras mountain ranges.
Given the harsh winter conditions of its habitat, the alpine marmot copes by sleeping -- and sleeping. Hibernations can last from October to April, but some have been observed staying in hibernation for nine months.
To hide from the elements, an alpine marmot digs a burrow through soil so hard, a human would have trouble breaking it with a pickaxe. Once it enters full hibernation sleep, the alpine marmot can slow its heart rate to just five beats per minute. This helps reduce its metabolism so it can survive by slowly using up its fat reserves.
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.