animal research websites for elementary students

The giveaway? Many of the links do not work, both on GenoChoice and RYT Hospital’s site. Upon clicking on the RYT Hospital link, viewers are directed to a hospital website that is quite official looking at first glance.

It’s essentially a service that allows parents to create the “perfect child.” While there aren’t many links on the site, GenoChoice states that it is affiliated with “RYT Hospital”. GenoChoice gives parents the opportunity to genetically modify their future child’s DNA to prevent diseases and health issues. GenoChoice: Create Your Own Genetically Healthy Child Online You can see them all here.Looking to test your students’ capabilities at figuring out if a website is real or not? Use these fake websites to help, but be careful! Looks may deceive you! Some of these sites are tougher to catch than others. Finally we published the websites and pasted the links to Google classroom.

Some students even added videos after class. I showed them how to add a caption by double clicking next to a picture and choosing the text box option from the pop-up menu. For images, the students used the built-in Google image search to find copyright-free pictures of their animals. Then they added a text box and typed the facts they found in their own words (we reviewed the problems with plagiarism). Students went to their Google drive and selected “New > More > Google Sites.” They added a title and found a suitable background header image. To create the websites we used the new Google sites. There are also several great sites for researching animals: National Geographic Kids, Go Wild by WWF, A-Z Animals, and Arkive (more advanced reading, but lots of photos and videos). I showed them how to do quick Google searches to find the information they needed, such as “animal name + predators,” for example. Next, I gave them some guidelines for their research: they had to find out the animal’s (1) habitat, (2) predators, (3) prey or diet, (4) length, and (5) an interesting fact. First the students chose their animals (we made sure that there weren’t too many duplicates by brainstorming a variety). Rivara’s class researched an animal and created a website about it. Fourth graders at Holladay Elementary have been learning about animal ecosystems in Science (SOL4.5) and measuring length in Math (SOL4.6).

Animal research websites for elementary students