Playlist: Bookmarks
Emoji Stories 🏰
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
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?
Random Emoji Prompt Generator
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests
For TeachersHere are a bunch of ways to quickly practice creativity with your students for zero dollars.
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?
Complex Task: Academic Tournaments
For TeachersWho would win in the Tournament of Least Useful Geometric Shapes or Bravest Shakespearean Characters? Create an academic tournament and watch your students’ brains sweat!
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
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.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
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!
Notice, Wonder: The Cliff
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
Showing A Character’s Trait
We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
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!
Better Stories Part 3: Literary Themes
A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes in…