Playlist: Bookmarks
St. Patrick and Other Legends
How would real people feel about the legends that have been created about them?
Getting Specific With St. Patrick’s Day Writing
Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!
Holiday Emoji Story 🎅
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Domesticated Animals Tournament
Which domesticated animal will win the tournament?
Robot Writing: The Bridge
One painting of a bridge. Three robots. Who wrote it best?
Words Within Words: TEACHER
How many words can you find within TEACHER?
How Many Will There Be? Crosses
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Not Like The Others: US National Parks
Four US national parks. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
What’s In My Brain!? Walnut vs Clouds
Let’s look at living vs non-living things.
Back to School: Rewriting The Beatles’ “Help!”
Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?
Concept Attainment: Hornet vs Tiger
Can your class spot the vertebrates vs invertebrates?
Words Within Words: AIRPLANE
How many words can you find within airplane?
Words Within Words: LEOPARD
How many words can you find within “leopard”?
Words Within Words: SATURN
How many words can you find within Saturn?
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
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?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
The Pros and Cons of Producers and Consumers
Sure, students might know the difference between a producer and a consumer… but have they considered how they feel about each other? What, in a producer’s opinion, are the pros and cons of a consumer?
Measurement: An Elephant
What if I told you that an elephant weighed a back-breaking 176,000? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? But… how many corgis would that be?
Writing A Thanksgiving Letter
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
Remixing A Holiday Poem
Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!
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.
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?
Systems Are Made up of Other Systems
A clock is a system. So is a rainforest. So is your school. Once you see systems inside systems, you can’t unsee it.
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.
Writing Seuss Style Poetry
Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!
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!
Notice, Wonder: Michael
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
Investigating Christmas Trees
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
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?
Why Is Our Calendar So Weird!?
Why are there 12 months? Why don’t weeks fit into months evenly? Why don’t weeks fit into the year evenly? What’s going on with the calendar!
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
Words Within Words: NUTCRACKER
How many words can you find within NUTCRACKER?
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.)
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
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’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
Historic Social Media
How would people from history have interacted online? Students will develop a conversation online between people involved in the same event from history.
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
An App For A Historical Figure
What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
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.
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.