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St. Patrick and Other Legends

How would real people feel about the legends that have been created about them?

Comparing Characters’ Bedrooms

What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?

Change A Story’s Genre

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

From “Too Many Choices” To “One Quality Task”

For Teachers

Fixing an under-developed (but interesting) task that was originally part of a choice menu.

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.

Hydromagnaphone (Greek and Latin)

What on earth is a Hydromagnaphone? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

Aquamorphotron (Greek and Latin)

What on earth is a Aquamorphotron? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

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?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

The Heaviest Pumpkin

How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?

A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong

Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?

Super Specific Similes: Quick Baby

Let’s make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.

Robot Writing: Volcano

Read three pieces of writing from three different robots about the same beautiful painting of a volcano. Who wrote it best?

Robot Writing: Acropolis

One painting of ruins. Three robots. Three pieces of writing. Who wrote it best?

Random Emoji Prompt Generator

Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.

Phrases to Join a Discussion

Want your classroom discussions to go a bit more smoothly? Train students to use a few simple phrases and it’ll make all the difference in the world.

Looking Closely at Holiday Photos

Let’s write from multiple perspectives using an old timey holiday photo!

Special Gifts with Special Requirements

Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!

Depth and Complexity: Patterns and Quadrilaterals

For Teachers

Why just “identifying patterns” isn’t deep enough.

Discussing An Important Decision from History

How would people with two different perspectives discuss a decision from history?

Introducing Universal Theme of Conflict

So what could you do with a Universal Theme of Conflict? Well, here’s an introduction that will get your students’ brains sweating.

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!?

Plant Adaptation Tournament

Who will win in a tournament of eight plants with Interesting adaptations!?

Tournament: 8 Wonders of the Solar System

Which location is the most wondrous place in the solar system?

Greek and Latin Word Part Paths

How can we go from Biology to Immobile?

Tournament of Ancient Inventions

Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?

Animal Adaptation Tournament

Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?

Antonym Paths

Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?

Analyzing Conflict with the Content Imperatives

How to go deep into conflict using the Content Imperatives.

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!

Addressing Disorganization

For Teachers

Know any kids who, despite their brilliant minds, have a bit of a hard time keeping things in order, turning things in on time, or remembering to put their names on their papers?

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?

Word Ladder: Two to Six (6-steps)

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

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!

Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings

Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!

Not Like The Others: Natural Disasters

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

Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?

So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?

Writing Technique: Triple Anadiplosis!

Have students mastered the art of anadiplosis: ending one sentence with the beginning of the next? Now it’s time to take it to the next level!

Doubling Up Writing: Anadiplosis

Repeating words can be what you want, if what you want is an interesting effect. (Psst, that’s an example of anadiplosis!)

Word Ladders Introduction

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

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?

Evens and Odds – Addition and Subtraction

When we’re adding and subtracting, do evens make odds into evens? Do odds make evens odd? Which one has… more power!?

Punctuation Power

In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!

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!

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: US Presidents

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

Not Like The Others: Planets

Which of these planets is not like others? Well, it sure looks simple at first. But each option could be the one that doesn’t fit in.

How Many Ways: Order of Operations 1

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

Advanced Alliteration and Consonance

When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.

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.

Parts of Speech Party – Thanks

How many different ways can we use the word “thanks”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

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?

What Would Poetry Think About Prose?

Poetry and Prose meet at a party. What would they say to each other? How would they feel about each other’s style?

The Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

The Angles of a Triangle

Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?

Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy

Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?

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.)

Synonym Graphs

So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?

Jabberwocky and Context Clues

Context clues lessons can be a disaster. Here, we expose students to a delightful classic packed with nonsense words (“Jabberwocky”) and ask them to decipher the meanings and parts of speech. Then, it’s only natural for students to write their own nonsense poems.

Propaganda and Logical Fallacies

Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.

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.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

Universal Themes

For Teachers

Universal Themes are an easy way to connect lessons, units, and content areas, even going across grade levels, and into students’ personal interests.

Math Curiosity: Finding Primes

Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!

Math Curiosity: Twin Primes

What do you call two prime numbers who are very close together?

Academic Love Letters

What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?

Studying and Remixing “The Raven”

Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?

Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?

Depth and Complexity: 👄 Language of the Discipline

Imagine a construction worker who doesn’t know the name of a screwdriver or a doctor who can’t remember what to call your neck. It’s pretty hard to communicate well without knowing the 👄 Language of the Discipline!

Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea

Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.

Depth and Complexity: 👓 Multiple Perspectives

Every topic looks different depending on who’s looking. This prompt teaches students to see through someone else’s eyes.

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.

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?

Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles

Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.

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!

“Its Big Day” – A Children’s Story About Its and It’s

Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

Literary Technique: Juxtaposition

Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!

Ways to Start a Sentence – Part 3

Your students’ sentences all start the same way. Here are three techniques that fix that overnight.

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!

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.

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.

Writing Clear Directions

Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?

Greek and Latin Dinosaur Names

Let’s create a new dinosaur using Greek and Latin stems!

Multiple Perspectives in Primary

For Teachers

Even our youngest students can learn to think from multiple perspectives!

Add Layers To Direct Instruction

For Teachers

Take direction instruction beyond a monotonous practice of the same skill over and over.

Better Stories Part 2: Types of Conflict

If your students’ stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it’s time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.