Playlist: Bookmarks
Power and Symbols
When does a simple symbol have more power than a word?
Halloween Problems and Solutions
When we try to solve a problem, sometimes we end up creating new problems. Which lead to new solutions. Which lead to new problems.
Holiday Emoji Story ⛷️
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Holiday Emoji Story 🍪
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Holiday Emoji Story ☃️
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Holiday Emoji Story 🎅
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Holiday Emoji Story 🚚
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Factors and Codes: First Names (Episode 2)
Scrambled up somewhere in 161,000 is a first name. Can you find it!?
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Zeta
Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?
Slow Motion Popcorn
What surprises can you spot when a kernel pops in super slow-mo?
Parts of Speech Party – Gift
How many different ways can we use the word “gift” in a single paragraph? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!
Parts of Speech Party – Care
How many different ways can we use the word “care”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!
Parts of Speech Party – Fruit
How many different ways can we use the word “fruit”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!
Parts of Speech Party – Change
How many different ways can we use the word “change”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!
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?
Words Within Words: STUFFING
How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.
Squiggles Collection 2
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)
How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?
Word Pyramids
Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?
Random Emoji Prompt Generator
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
How Many Will There Be? Squares in Squares
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Analyze Paragraphs: Empire State Building
Three paragraphs about the Empire State Building. They all cover the same topic — so what makes each one different? Now combine them into one super-paragraph.
Inferring With Art: A Couple
What’s going on in this room? There are shoes everywhere! Are those… oranges? Let’s make some inferences!
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: Wild Tic Tac Toe
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe, but both players can both play as both X and O throughout the whole game!
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?
So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?
Math Curiosity: Ulam Spiral
What if we make a huge spiral of numbers and then highlight only the primes? Well, a bunch of weird patterns show up!
Generalization: Change Leads to More Change
Can you think of a time in your life when “Change lead to more change?”
Order Can Be Natural or Constructed
When is order natural and when is it designed by people?
Generalization: Problems Lead to New Rules, Which Lead to New Problems
Problems create rules. Rules create new problems. Can you trace the cycle in history, stories, and your own life?
Invisible Power Can Have Visible Effects
Can you think of times when power is unseen, but we can clearly see its effects?
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?
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.
Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?
What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
Exponents – How Low Can They Go?
Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?
Student Introductions with Complexity and Frames
How have you changed over time? Students introduce themselves through the lens of change — and learn a Depth and Complexity tool in the process.
Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals
Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?
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: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
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?
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!
Place Value (Beyond Base 10)
Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?
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.)
Finding The Volume of Laptops
How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!
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: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake 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.
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.
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.
Create A Civilization: Calendars
Why 12 months? Why 30ish days? Why 7 days in a week? Your civilization could organize a year in any way you want!
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction
Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.
Content Imperatives: Paradox
How can one idea pull in opposite directions, being both true and false or right and wrong at the same time? It’s time to explore Paradoxes!
Content Imperatives: Convergence
Add complexity by considering how multiple factors 🔄 Converge within one topic.
Content Imperatives: Parallel
Get students thinking broadly by exploring similarities across multiple topics. Combine with Depth and Complexity for bonus points!
Content Imperatives: Contribuition
Pull on one thread and watch the whole topic move. Contribution asks: what single factor is quietly shaping everything else?
Content Imperatives: Origin
Take students back to the beginning by using the Content Imperative ⏺️ Origin.
Studying and Remixing “The Raven”
Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?
Depth and Complexity: 📈 Trends
Has something been changing recently? What might be causing that? What are the effects?
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: ⚖️ Ethics
Want to add drama to any topic? Use the Ethics prompt!
Depth and Complexity: 🚦 Rules
Is there a consequence for not doing something? You may have found a rule!
Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea
Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.
Depth and Complexity: 📚 Across Disciplines
No topic is an island! With the 📚 Across Disciplines prompt, students note connections within and across multiple fields.
Depth and Complexity: ⏳ Change Over Time
Want to get students thinking about how a topic has changed or might change in the future? The ⏳ Change Over Time thinking tool is just what you need!
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.
Depth and Complexity: Patterns
Can your students spot anything that repeats? Or that has stopped repeating?
Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details
Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.
Visualizing Fraction Multiplication
What does it look like to multiply fractions?
Percents and Credit Cards
Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!
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?
Curriculum Compacting
For TeachersShrink the curriculum down to what students actually need to learn. Then use the freed-up time for something better.
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
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?
Greek and Latin Dinosaur Names
Let’s create a new dinosaur using Greek and Latin stems!