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Student Introductions With Depth and Frames

Want to introduce the tools of Depth and Complexity and learn more about your students and introduce the Frame graphic organizer? Have I got the activity for you!

A Lunar Survival Mission

A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?

Ongoing Greek and Latin Word Part Activities

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

SCAMPER: Scaffolding Creativity

Asking students to "think creatively" won't get you far. They won't know how to start, they'll get stuck with simple ideas, or they'll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.

A Donut Investigation

In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They'll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.

Showing A Character’s Trait

We tell students to "show, not tell" in their writing, but this advice isn't effective until they experience the difference. In this video, we'll put a famous character (of students' choosing) into a mundane situation and develop a fun scene to show off their main traits.

The Game of 100

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project

Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!

More Specific than “Smart”

When students are told that they're "smart", what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn't what we intended.)

The Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem

No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?

Characters Dressed as Other Characters for Halloween

What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they're both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?

Creating A Classroom Motto

Starting with specific examples of fantastic classroom behavior, your class will end up with one sentence summing up their expectations. It's a classroom motto!

Word Ladders Introduction

You won't believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids' brains sweating over the smallest of words.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

Want students to understand how a paragraph fits together? Explode one and make them reassemble it using the clues in each sentence! I even wrote a little app to bust a paragraph up for you.

Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)

Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.

Building Creative Analogies

We'll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.

Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe

So, I heard you like Tic-Tac-Toe. What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it? 🤯

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1

"Add more variety!" I'd say to my class. But I never really knew what this actually meant. Suprise! This bad advice never improved students' writing. In these videos, students learn nine specific ways to add variety just by changing the beginning of their sentences. This was easily one of my students' favorite writing tools - because it actually helped them.

Analyze Character Change with Depth and Complexity

Your students will use Depth and Complexity to note how a character's main trait changes across a story.