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Strategy Game: Sprouts

With Sprouts, students draw a small set of dots and then connect those dots with lines. The first person who can’t make a connection loses.

Math Game: Cram

A surprisingly strategic game played on a simple grid.

Math Game: Heaps

Heaps is a lovely math-y strategy game that requires no more than paper and pencil to play.

Writing in Pi-lish

Here’s the perfect constraint for March! Writing with the digits of Pi.

How I Learned (Almost) Everything I Know

I didn’t learn by listening to speakers or reading books or going to conferences or by scrolling through lists of resources.

Concentric Circles – Getting Students to Think Bigger (and Smaller!)

This differentiation technique is called “Concentric Circles”. You use it to move students up and down the ladder of abstraction, applying a single idea in multiple contexts.

How long should we wait after asking a question?

I might ask the best questions in the world, but if I don’t give students even three seconds to think, those questions aren’t doing their job. Here’s what we know about Wait Time.

Analyzing Prefixes and Suffixes

Instead of just memorizing what a bunch of morphemes mean, we’re looking broadly, exploring patterns, finding unexpected similarities and weird differences.

From “Summarize” to “Synthesize”

Even what seems like a low-level “summarize” task can become beautifully high-level when we climb Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Thinking Like Producers About Consumers

Here’s how I’d use ethics and multiple perspectives to get students thinking about producers, consumers, and decomposers in new and interesting ways.

Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!

When we jump from “this kid likes board games” straight to “I’ll have them create a new board game”, we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here’s how to scaffold a truly creative task.

Who bends over backwards? And for whom?

Who runs the show? Support staff or teachers?

Just How Much Pasta Could I Cook…

So, just how much pasta could I cook in an Olympic-sized pool?

Rewrite It, But Don’t Use “E”

Here’s an interesting way to move students past mundane patterns in their writing. Ask for a rewrite, but without a letter (or two).

Ask Sequences, Never One-Off Questions

Beware one-off questions. Any question that we prepare should have a natural follow-up question. And those follow-ups should push students up Bloom’s Taxonomy.

2021 In Review

It’s the tenth annual review here at Byrdseed!

Reflecting and Planning With Four Lists

Four lists I update every time I sit down to reflect and plan.

A Leader’s Job Isn’t Giving Presentations

If I were advising folks who are new to a leadership position in education, I’d give one piece of advice.

Differentiate Like A Playground

Here’s why I never approach a lesson as being “for a grade.” Instead, I think of a lesson as I’d think of baseball, chess, or the piano.

Focus on Thinking, Not the Product

When I was a new teacher, you would have seen some pretty fancy products hanging in my room, but if you stopped to consider how my kids thought about the content… well, often my students just restated facts that I had already told them.

Grow Your Own Leaders

You don’t need to hire experts to fly in and do a one-day training. Look within your ranks for potential leaders. Equip them with resources and opportunities. Grow your own leaders.

Using Art to Practice Reading

When you’re teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?

Universal Themes and… Punctuation!?

Here’s how can we move a punctuation lesson beyond mere memorization and towards actually interesting thinking.

Which is longer: a Ray or a Line?

Let’s move beyond memorizing definitions and get kids grappling with the fascinating concept of infinity!

Universal Themes in Math? With Fractions!?

What if we used a universal theme to guide our study of fractions? These very big ideas get students thinking about fractions in a new way.

Improve Objectives By Asking “Then What?”

How to push your learning objective beyond the bottom of Bloom’s and get kids thinking in interesting ways.

Using a Classic in Math!?

According to Costello, 7 × 13 = 28. In fact, watch him prove it…

Combining Depth and Complexity Prompts into a Generalization

Let’s start with a puzzlement, ask kids to generate an abstract statement, and then find evidence that their statement works across several different areas.

Let’s Play Tic-Tac-Toe Variants!

Sure, tic tac toe is too boring for most people. But oh golly are there some fun variations!

You have a new gifted program! What do you do now?

You’ve been plunked into a new 1st through 8th-grade gifted pull-out program… what do you do?

Help Students to Memorize Anything

If we want students to remember the material we teach, we have to set them up for success. Use techniques like chunking, mnemonics, and spaced repetition to slowly move information into your students’ long-term memory.

How to Help Students Remember their Notes

There’s no special note-taking system to solve your students’ memorization needs. Instead, we have to teach them how (and when) to review their notes.

Direct Instruction: A Model For Learning A Skill

Direct Instruction is the model to use when we want to teach students to perform a specific skill. It gently moves from teacher modeling to independent student practice.

Keeping Interest Inventories Simple

Asking kids what they’re interested in should be simple, right? But look online for “interest inventories” and you’ll find multi-page documents with dozens of questions! Let’s keep this simple.

Inquiry Training: Teach Students To Ask Better Questions

Inquiry Training is a model of instruction that looks a lot like 20 Questions. You’ll teach your students to ask more helpful questions and to avoid rushing to a hypothesis too quickly.

My Favorite Models of Instruction

I used to teach without any structure. Just “blah blah blah”ing. Then I only knew Direct Instruction. THEN I learned that there are more than a dozen models of instruction to build my lessons around.

Scholar’s Cafe

Get students moving, thinking, writing, and reading each others’ ideas with a Scholar’s Cafe.

Why I Stopped Giving Talks

I made my living talking about teaching. Here’s why I’m done with that!

A Classic: “Who’s On First” and 21st Century Kids

My 21st century 12-year-olds absolutely died watching Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” skit. And we got a great homophone activity out of it too.

Making Our Own Depth and Complexity Icon Posters (That Emphasize Thinking)

Why I let students make their own depth and complexity posters rather than buying and displaying professional printable posters.

Sharpening Questions

With some small changes, we can turn fluffy opinion questions into thought-provoking evaluation questions.

Remix the Song “Help!”

Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.

Embed A Classic

An easy way to spice up any lesson is to remove the god-awful samples and replace them with selections from great works of art, music, film, tv shows, and historic moments. You get the added bonus of exposing students to new ideas.

Could we fit 1,000 kids on the playground? 10,000?

If your students can find the area of a square then, armed with Google Earth, they can also figure out how many students you could pack into your school’s playground.

Concept Formation: A Model for Inductive Thinking

Here’s are the steps for running an inductive lesson based on Hilda Taba’s model of Concept Formation. Plus a sample lesson about the Nile River.

Find The Controversy in Any Topic

By leveraging a point of contention, we can get students interested in just about any topic. Yes, even boring old spelling has controversy we can exploit!

Plan Lessons Using Deductive Thinking

When we write a deductive lesson, we purposefully plan around a juicy big idea and then let our students prove or disprove it with specific evidence.

How I Evaluate Resources and Tools For Gifted Classrooms

When it comes to choosing which tools and resources to bring into a classroom of gifted kids, I have three rules.

The Marshmallow Challenge

A fantastic fuzzy problem to start the year. Students use pasta and tape to try to get a marshmallow up as high as possible.

Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect

I love the term “Synthesize” from the classic Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite “Synthesize Recipe” is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.

Get Ridiculous!

One technique for finding complexity in a topic is to look for the edge cases, the outliers, the really big or small versions.

What could we do with this Wax Museum event?

How one might revamp a “Wax Museum” project into something that focuses more on thinking than product.

Fizz Buzz – A Divisibility Game

Here’s a quick to learn but difficult to master math game. Start with some basic divisibility rules, but then feel free to extend it to any math topic.

Tweaks To A Character Study

A teacher sent me a sequence of questions about the story My Father’s Dragon. Based on what you’ve read so far, what is one word you could use to describe Elmer? What from the story made you choose this word? Think of other books you’ve read. What character from another story you know is similar […]

Why My Toddler Likes Lego, Not Duplo

Even though he’s in the Duplo age range, my kid is simply more interested in Lego. And it’s always more effective, more respectful, and simply easier to start with a kid’s interests rather than what’s “age-appropriate.”

Students Need More Than Independent Work

It’s so easy to just ask advanced students to work by themselves in a corner. But, the more advanced the kid, the more they need advanced instruction and adult guidance.

Let Your Brain Breathe!

I was breathing in too much. I needed to exhale. I didn’t need more ideas. I needed to do less!

2020’s Year in Review

I went back and forth about whether I’d write an annual review for 2020 (I’ve written these since 2011), but I’m sure that I’ll want to look back and read 2020’s review someday, so here we go! Travel I used to include a section about the states I had visited and all of the events […]

The Coloring Problem

How few colors can you use to fill in a map so that no neighboring regions are the same color?

The Parable of the Reading Posters

Why did these reading posters go from mandatory to illegal?

Getting Ridiculous with Parts of Speech

Here’s how you can add some spice to an otherwise dull study of parts of speech.

Homeschooling With Depth and Complexity

A brain dump for ideas about using Depth and Complexity while homeschooling.

How to Find Ideas for Kindergarten and Primary?

How I would find great ideas for your most advanced primary students, whether they’re in kindergarten, first grade, or second grade.

How To Get A Kid To Read

No reader has ever said, “I love reading because my parents made me read challenging books” or “Once my teacher made me read at Lexile 980, I discovered how wonderful reading is!”

Question Renovation Techniques

A few techniques I found myself using as I renovated old questions from my classroom.

Talk To Your Past Students

Are you ignoring the most cost-effective feedback about your program’s effectiveness? Talk to some past students!

“Priority” is Singular

You can only have one priority. Anything else is a cop-out.

Using Games to Practice Thinking

Here’s how playing simple, paper-and-pencil games can go beyond fun and also serve as practice for higher-level, abstract thinking.

Evaluate with Academic Tournaments

The bracketed tournament isn’t just for college basketball. Set up a tournament to determine best president, state, element, or literary character and challenge your students to make interesting judgements.

Rewriting a Sentence With Different Coordinating Conjunctions

The first unit in our writing program was always teaching the coordinating conjunctions. It always felt goofy teaching this to 6th graders – especially a gifted magnet class. I mean… do they really not know the difference between “and” and “but”?

Does Your Website Tell Your Story?

Make sure you’re maximizing the #1 place to tell a story: your program’s webpage.

Running A Gifted Program: Parent Nights

I’ve been to over a hundred parent nights and my main takeaway is this: use the time to build a community and get to know your parents’ needs. And stay away from PowerPoint!

The Westing Game – Book Study Ideas

Sixteen unlikely heirs? A mysterious murder? A fortune on the line? Let’s dig into The Westing Game!

Which One is Not Like The Others?

When we ask kids “which one is not like the others”, our cleverest students love to find ways to pick the non-obvious answer. So why not use this as a framework for pushing students deeper into our content.

Thinking Like Equivalent Fractions

Go across disciplines by asking students to write a story about fraction equivalence.

Calculating the Volume of Laptops

So once your students can calculate volume… what do you have them do next? In this math project, kids will look up historic laptops, calculate their volumes, and note how technology has changed over time.

Depth and Complexity Frames: My Big Mistake

Frames, a graphic organizer often used with the Depth and Complexity framework, have one big trap that I fell into for years.

Synonym Graphs

Use a two-dimensional scatter plot to dig into the nuances of several synonyms.

Fill ‘er up with Clam Chowder!

Sure gasoline seems expensive. Until you try to fill your car up with other liquids!

2019 Year In Review

It’s that time of year when I look back and look forward. I’ve been writing these since 2011 and it’s always rewarding to look back at what I was thinking in the past and how it’s changed over the years. What Stuck (and What Didn’t) As I reviewed the past, here’s what I stuck with: […]

Moving Beyond The Cliché With Alliteration

One mark of an advanced writer is their use of figurative language. An on-level writer might use figurative language correctly but will rely heavily on clichés. An advanced writer will surprise us with interesting, often more nuanced use of figurative language. And nowhere is this more apparent than with alliteration.

Making Awful Graphs

Sometimes we can learn a lot by doing something the wrong way. Here are six ways your students can purposefully design awful, misleading graphs.

Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies

Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here’s a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.

Creating A New Mathematical Operation

Do your students realize that addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are all examples of the same idea: an operation? And that it’s quite possible to create a brand new operation? Let’s do it!

Finding the Fun in “It’s” vs “Its”

How do we differentiate a dull lesson like “its” vs “it’s”? I decided to push it to an extreme (and include some unexpected novelty).

Creating A New Creature

We’re not doing a fluffy art project here. Kids are developing a realistic, made up creature that could have actually lived in a particular biome.

The Surprises Within a Triangle’s Angles

Discovering what is interesting and unexpected about a triangle’s angles. What twists have I unintentionally spoiled for my students over the years?

Make A Better Calendar!

The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don’t they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?

How is “High Achiever” different from “Gifted”?

Why the distinction between “high-achiever” and “gifted” was important to me personally and professionally.

Leaders Absorb Complexity and Pass on Simplicity

As leaders we have to constantly ask ourselves this question: Is this easy for me or is it easy for the people I’m leading? Very rarely is something easy for both parties.

Why I Quit Scouts

As a kid, I got all the way to the top of Cub Scouts, but I never became a Boy Scout. I quit before I made the jump. Here’s why.

Differentiate Math: Getting Started

Working with a student who is bored in math? Quickly finishing lessons? Needs something more? Here are three ways you can get started differentiating in math.

Acceleration – The Simplest (but Least Used) Differentiation Technique

Acceleration is a cheap and simple way to differentiate for students who are ready for something more. It can mean skipping a whole grade but is more commonly accomplished through subject-specific acceleration. Lots of people have weird arguments against acceleration, but the research shows that it works (when done well).

A Christmas Carol – Study Guide Ideas

Take your students through Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol this holiday season and expose them to a classic while exploring the Universal Theme of Change. And, hey, since this story’s in the public domain, you can print out a PDF or link to the text at Project Gutenburg. A Christmas Carol Summary Dickens has organized […]