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Playlist: ALP

Struggle Makes Us Stronger

How the lotus can teach your young students about resiliency.

Regulating Our Emotions

Tools to help your young students regulate their emotions.

Two Animals Switch Biomes

What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?

Change A Story’s Genre

What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?

Greekymon Studies – Round 1

What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?

Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)

How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Eta

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

A Character’s Playlist

What playlist of songs best goes with a character’s change over time?

Categorize and Re-Categorize Animals

Put these animals into groups. Then do it again. Then… do it one more time. How does re-re-grouping the same creatures reveal new patterns and give new insights?

How Many Ways: Fractions Multiply 2/3

How many different ways can you make this fraction multiplication statement true using only the digits one through nine?

Not Like The Others: Rainforests

Which of these rainforests is not like the others?

How Many Will There Be? Desks

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

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?

Developing Questions that Prompt Thinking in Math

For Teachers

Math is a particularly tricky subject for asking higher-level questions. Here are a couple of techniques I’ve used to prompt students to think, not merely calculate.

Word Ladder: Arm to Leg (6-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder: Kid to Old (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Not Like The Others: Natural Disasters

Four natural disasters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Story Starter: A Magical School

Students use 12 random phrases to create a story that takes place in at a magical school.

Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?

Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.

Asking Questions That Make Students Think

For Teachers

Most classroom questions test memory. These questions test thinking. There’s a difference — and your students will feel it.

Upgrade Research Questions With Depth and Complexity

Ever ask students to create research questions? Were their ideas a bit… blah? My own students had a very hard time writing questions they didn’t already know the answer to! This video is how I solved that problem: upgrade research questions with depth and complexity.

Doubling Dollars

Say you have a dollar. Say you can double that dollar each day: $1, $2, $4, and so on. How long will it take to reach… one million dollars? Not as long as you might think!

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.

Creating A Realistic Flower and Pollinator

Your students will create a new flower, designed to attract a specific pollinator.

Reduce Anxiety: Change The Channel (Tool 2)

Reduce anxiety by learning to “change the channel.”

A Nutrition-Based Math Project

Let’s create a parody ad attacking a surprisingly calorie-rich meal.