☰ Year plan · Communication Technology

Search strategies

Week 7 · Theme 1, Lesson 7 Information Search Strategies · 3 lessons
2

Topics, subtopics and key words

ICT P5 Term 1, Theme 1: pp. 34–37
GoalChoose key words instead of whole sentences and narrow a big question.
New words
key word · an important word that shows what you are looking forsearch engine · a tool that finds pages that match your wordsbroad · covering too many thingsnarrow · focused on one small thing
Explanation

A search engine does not understand long sentences like a friend does. It looks for words. So we give it key words, the few most important words. Instead of ‘Please tell me how camels live in the desert and what they eat’, use ‘camel desert food’. Drop small words like ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘please’. A question can also be too broad. ‘Animals’ gives millions of pages. A narrower question, such as ‘camel hump fat’, gives pages you can use. If the first words give too many or too few results, change the words. Always do searches with a teacher or a family member, using a child-safe browser.

Whole sentenceKey words
Please tell me how camels live in the desertcamel desert life
What do kites need to fly highkite wind tail
How was bread made in old Egyptancient Egypt bread
Worked examples
flatbreadkey wordsbetter results
Salma wants to find how flatbread is baked. She types ‘how do people bake flatbread in a village oven’. A friend says: use key words. She changes it to ‘flatbread village oven’ and the results fit better.
sportsswimmingfor beginners
Seif’s topic is ‘sports’. That is broad. He narrows it to ‘swimming’, and then to ‘swimming for beginners’. Each step gives a smaller, more useful set of pages.
teahow it is grown
Marwan searches ‘tea’ and gets pages about trees, shops and cups. He adds ‘how tea is grown’. The pages now fit his question.
Class activity

Key word cards. Write five long questions on cards (for example ‘What do donkeys eat in winter?’). On the back, write the key words. A partner checks: did you drop small words and keep the important ones? Then take one broad topic and make it narrower in three steps, like ‘animals → camels → camel hump’.

Practice
1
What is a key word?
2
Write the key words for: ‘Please tell me how kites fly high’.
3
Which is narrower: ‘animals’ or ‘camel hump fat’?
4
A search gives too many results. What can you do?