Playlist: Bookmarks
Adding and Subtracting Fruit
Use super cute fruit to introduce algebraic thinking to your young math students.
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.
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
Words Within Words: STUFFING
How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.
The Heaviest Pumpkin
How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?
Robot Writing: Volcano
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots about the same beautiful painting of a volcano. Who wrote it best?
An Olympic Sized Pool and 2 Liter Bottles (Episode 1)
How many 2 liter bottles could you fill up using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
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?
Not Like The Others: Penguins
Four penguins. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Animal Adaptation Tournament
Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
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?
Ambiguous Sentences
Rather than just demand that students “write clearly,” we’ll explore the hazards of poorly written sentences… and maybe create one of our own!
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.
Virtue or Vice?
Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.
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!
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.
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
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.
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.
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!
Describing Author’s Voice
What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
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!
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.
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.
Math Curiosity: Waring’s Conjecture
So, can you write every odd (greater than 3) as the sum of three primes?
Improving Presentations 4: The Big Day
How do you mentally (and emotionally) prepare yourself for the big day?
Improving Presentations 3: The Storyboard and Slides
It’s time to turn that outline into a storyboard and then some actual slides.
Improving Presentations 2: Planning The Outline
After watching some great presenters, let’s outline your presentation!
Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats
Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
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!
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?
Visualizing Fraction Multiplication
What does it look like to multiply fractions?
A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions
Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?
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.
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.