Playlist: Bookmarks
Valentine’s Day Codes
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
Two Animals Switch Biomes
What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?
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: WREATH
How many words can you find within WREATH?
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
Super Specific Similes – Slimy Broccoli
Start with a basic simile. Now make it more specific. Now even more. Watch how much better writing gets with each round.
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!?
Writing About Art: Twilight in the Wilderness
Look closely at Twilight in the Wilderness. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Fancier Figurative Language: Use the Opposite
Let’s start with “As cold as fire.”
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
Story Starter: Amusement Park
Students use 12 random phrases to write a story that takes place in at an amusement park.
Characters Dressed as Other Characters for Halloween
What if one character dressed up as another for Halloween? Would the Cat in the Hat pick Captain Jack Sparrow, because they’re both chaotic yet good-natured people? Would Elsa dress up as The Ice King since they are both lonely?
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.
Fancier Figurative Language: Advanced Repetition
Is your students’ use of repetition limited to, “The girl was very, very, very fast.”? Let’s borrow some ideas from Shakespeare!
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Run On or Not? – What’s In My Brain
Can your students spot the run-on sentences?
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!
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.
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.
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche
We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.
Better Stories Part 1: The Big Idea
We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.