Playlist: Bookmarks
Valentine’s Day Codes
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
Emoji Stories 🏰
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
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?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Thanksgiving Photo Writing
Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.
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!?
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!
How Many Will There Be? Sliced Circles
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
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: Fast to Race (4 step)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Story Starter: Amusement Park
Students use 12 random phrases to write a story that takes place in at an amusement park.
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
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!
Plurals: An Inductive Spelling Lesson
Plural nouns in English are deliciously fascinating. Yet most plural lessons are so dull! In this experience, students are given a pile of plurals and then inductively create groups and pull out rules and patterns.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
Sets of Idioms
Why do we say ‘break a leg’? Five themed sets of idioms your students will actually remember.
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?
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 2
We’ll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.