Playlist: Bookmarks
Who has more power: the Queen Bee or the Hive?
Who really runs the hive: the queen, or the thousands of bees around her?
Order, Chaos, and the Holiday Season
Let’s write a holiday song about order and chaos!
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
Words Within Words: SCARECROW
How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Measurement: How Old Is Mr. Byrd?
What if I told you that I’m 341,640 old? Could you figure out what unit I’m using? Hint: it’s not years!
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
Think Like A Philosopher
What would Socrates have thought if he watched Frozen?
Writing A Thanksgiving Letter
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
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.
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?
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.)
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.