Playlist: Bookmarks
A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong
Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?
Random Emoji Prompt Generator
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
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?
What’s In My Brain!? Walnut vs Clouds
Let’s look at living vs non-living things.
Olympics: Winter vs Summer Medal Count
Which country has a great balance between their summer and winter Olympic medals?
Racetrack – Race Around A Graph
How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?
Mow A Lawn
How long would it take to mow a very large lawn with a push-mower?
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Parabolic Curve Art
Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.
Tournament of Presidents
So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?
Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe
What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?
Paradox: Rebuilding A Ship
What if we completely rebuild something slowly? What if we completely rebuild it all at once? Is it still the same thing?
Thinking With Art: Head Down
One artist, two paintings. Notice details, compare, synthesize, then find a parallel in another creator’s work.
Inferring With Art: Two Women
What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!
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!
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: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
Remixing A Holiday Poem
Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!
Math Curiosity: Goldbach’s Conjecture
Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!
Create Your Own Operation
The commutative and associative properties are a whole lot more interesting when you apply them to a mathematical operation that you created!
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!
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.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
Not Like The Others: Charlotte’s Web
Four Charlotte’s Web characters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Do Narrators Have Too Much Power?
Imagine being a character in a story. Are you worried that your story’s narrator may inaccurately describe you? What if they reveal something you wanted to be kept secret? Do narrators have too much power!?
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Sets of Idioms
Why do we say ‘break a leg’? Five themed sets of idioms your students will actually remember.
Investigating Christmas Trees
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
Exponents – How Low Can They Go?
Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?
Rounding Numbers (But Not To 10)
What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?
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?
Sprouts
Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.
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 Angles of a Triangle
Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?
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?
Math Curiosity: Odds & Squares
Why does the sum of the first 5 odds also equal 5 squared?
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
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!
Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle
What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?
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.
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction
Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.
Math Curiosity: Legendre’s Conjecture
It seems like there’s always a prime number between two perfect squares… but is this always the case!?
Academic Love Letters
What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?
Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number
You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?
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.
Elements of The Fantasy Genre
Every fantasy story has patterns hiding underneath the magic. Once your students see the elements, they’ll spot them everywhere — and use them in their own writing.
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!
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
Motivation and Moral Development
Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
Common English Words From Other Languages
Bored with typical spelling studies? Let’s dig into the origins of common English words from other languages!
Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche
We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.
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…
Better Stories Part 4: Character Archetypes
Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.