South Dakota ELA 9-10.W.8.a

ELAGrades 9–10Writing

The Standard

Use advanced searches effectively.

South Dakota English Language Arts Standards (2025)

Teacher's field guide

What Students Need to Do: Students build search queries that narrow results for a writing task. They use tools such as quotation marks, site limits, and date filters, then change their search when results miss the topic.
What Mastery Looks Like: A student can find a recent government source on a topic without sorting through pages of unrelated results. They can explain why they chose their search terms and how they narrowed the results.
Common Misconceptions: Students may put quotation marks around a whole question, then get few or no results. They may assume the first result is the best one or keep repeating a search that is not working.
How to Assess It: Exit ticket: Find a government page from 2023 or later about teen vaping. Record your search query, the filter you used, and the page title.

Lesson moves

Have pairs search teen vaping three ways: plain words, an exact phrase in quotation marks, and site:gov; compare the first five results.
Ask students to write two sentences explaining which query found the most useful source for a report on teen vaping.
Give teams a search challenge: find a recent government source on sleep and teens using site:gov and a date filter.
For a letter about a local park, have students search the city website for its meeting minutes and note one relevant decision.

Free download

A ready-to-print activity worksheet aligned to 9-10.W.8.a, with an answer key for the teacher on its own page. No account needed.

PDF, US Letter, prints cleanly in black and white.

Keep exploring

Grade, subject, topic, and the complete standard are prefilled. Create one free, no account needed.