Playlist: Bookmarks
Back to School Math Worksheets
In these math problems, the solution is already given. But another number is missing!
Holiday Emoji Story ⛷️
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Student Introductions With Depth, Complexity, and Frames: Level Two
Once students know the prompts of Depth and Complexity, let’s take them much higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles
Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?
Parts of Speech Party: Introduction (Check)
How many ways can we use “check” in a paragraph? And can your students spot when it’s a verb, or a noun, or an adjective?
Words Within Words: CRANBERRY
How many words can you find within “cranberry”?
An Olympic Sized Pool and Jet Fuel (Episode 3)
How many times could you fill up a jet plane using the fuel that would fit in an olympic-sized pool?
An Olympic Sized Pool and Lots of Pasta (Episode 2)
How many pounds of pasta could you cook using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
How Many Will There Be? Earthworm
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Drawing An Impossible Triangle
Here’s how you can draw The Penrose Triangle, an example of an impossible shape.
Drawing Knots, Level 2
How to draw a more complex version of this twisty Henri Matisse knot!
Drawing Knots, Level 1
How to draw a simple version of this twisty Henri Matisse knot!
Notice, Wonder: Krzywy Las
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!
How Many Will There Be? Pyramids
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
How Many Will There Be? Stairs
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?
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?
So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?
Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.
Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle
In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.
Math Curiosity: Ulam Spiral
What if we make a huge spiral of numbers and then highlight only the primes? Well, a bunch of weird patterns show up!
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
Generalization: Change Leads to More Change
Can you think of a time in your life when “Change lead to more change?”
Generalization: Problems Lead to New Rules, Which Lead to New Problems
Problems create rules. Rules create new problems. Can you trace the cycle in history, stories, and your own life?
What If There Were No Hundreds Place?
Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?
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!
The Tournament of Biomes
Want to move beyond memorizing the characteristics of biomes? In this lesson, students work through a Tournament of Biomes, explaining which biome wins in each round (based on criteria you choose). In the end, they crown a 👑 Champion Biome!
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
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.
Undoing Multiplication With Division
Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!
Student Introductions with Complexity and Frames
How have you changed over time? Students introduce themselves through the lens of change — and learn a Depth and Complexity tool in the process.
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!
Math Curiosity: Four Squares
Every positive integer can be written as the sum of (at most) four perfect squares!
Math Curiosity: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
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?
Deducing the Area of Triangles
Using patterns, students try to deduce where that area formula came from.
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.
What Does it Cost to Fill a Car with Other Liquids
Is gas actually that expensive? What if we filled a car up with… orange juice?
What Do Mean and Median Mean?
When will mean and median give us different results?
Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea
Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.
Depth and Complexity: Patterns
Can your students spot anything that repeats? Or that has stopped repeating?
Percents and Credit Cards
Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!
Create A Creature
Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
A Nutrition-Based Math Project
Let’s create a parody ad attacking a surprisingly calorie-rich meal.
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
A Grid-Based Fraction Project
You’ve got 60 spaces on a grid to create an amusement park, a house, a farm, or whatever you’d like. Divide it into seven pieces, order it by size, combine into two halves, and more in this fraction project.
Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?
What if you had an original iPod and sold it compared to if you had bought the equivalent amount of Apple stock and sold that?