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Back to School Math Worksheets

In these math problems, the solution is already given. But another number is missing!

Polar Weather Report

The North Pole hits -40°. The South Pole hits -60°. Calculate the averages, graph the data, and deliver your polar weather report.

Analyzing Conflict with the Content Imperatives

How to go deep into conflict using the Content Imperatives.

Analyze Characters Using Philosophy

What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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: 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.

Notice, Wonder: Akron

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah

Can students spot similes vs metaphors?

Fraction Ordering Tournament

Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!

Bulls and Cows

How quickly can you break the numeric code?

Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles

Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?

Intersecting Angles and Streets

There can never be just one angle.

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.

Undoing Multiplication With Division

Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!

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?

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?

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?

Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!

A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.

Analyzing Movies’ Success

So should we make another movie in this series?

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.

Math Curiosity: Primes and Squares

Can any perfect square be written as the sum of two primes?

What Do Mean and Median Mean?

When will mean and median give us different results?

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.

Running A Group Investigation Lesson

For Teachers

Learn to lead a lesson that is built entirely on student curiosity.

Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

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

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: ❓ Unanswered Questions

This underutilized tool focuses students on what we don’t yet know and even what we can’t know.

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.

Visualizing Fraction Multiplication

What does it look like to multiply fractions?

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.

A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions

Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?

Running A Curiosity Based Research Project

Skip the assigned topics. Let students research what they’re genuinely curious about — here’s how to structure it so it actually works.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

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

How Many Students Can Fit On The Playground?

So… just how many kids could we cram onto the playground?

Asynchrony: Developing At Different Rates (For Students)

For students! In some areas, a student may be shockingly advanced, while in others… surprisingly average. This is asynchrony in action.

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!

Writing Summaries in Haiku

Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.

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.

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

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

An Inductive Exploration Of Geometry

For Teachers

With inductive thinking, students will work from parts to whole, discovering big ideas along the way!

Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?

What if you had an original iPod and sold it compared to if you had bought the equivalent amount of Apple stock and sold that?

Impostor Syndrome

For Teachers

The student who breezes through school may hit a wall in college. Here’s why — and what to do about it now.

Add Layers To Direct Instruction

For Teachers

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