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Playlist: Bookmarks

Notice, Wonder: Dazzle

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

Words Within Words: Chocolate

How many words can you find within Chocolate?

Holiday Shuffle – Day vs Date

Wouldn’t some holidays be better on a certain day of the week? Should Thanksgiving have a set date?

Words Within Words: PATRICK

How many words can you find within Patrick?

Tournament of Mythological Creatures

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

Tournament of Not-So-Famous Inventors

Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?

What’s In My Brain: Austin vs Los Angeles

We’re looking at capital cities.

New Uses For A Cardboard Tube

So, what can a cardboard tube be used for other than holding wrapping paper?

Halloween Emoji Story 🎃

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Halloween Emoji Story 🌕

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Halloween Emoji Story 🕷️

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Student Introductions With Depth, Complexity, and Frames: Level Two

Once students know the prompts of Depth and Complexity, let’s take them much higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Geosynth (Greek and Latin)

What on earth is a Geosynth? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

Aquamorphotron (Greek and Latin)

What on earth is a Aquamorphotron? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

Pyrostasis (Greek and Latin)

What on earth is a Pyrostasis? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.

Mother’s Day Cards

Let’s write the cleverest Mother’s Day cards you’ve ever seen!

Letters With Symmetry

Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!

Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)

How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?

Natural Disasters Tournament

Earthquake vs. hurricane. Tsunami vs. wildfire. Students set the criteria, argue their case, and crown a champion. Warning: it gets heated.

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.

Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles

Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?

How to Reset Your Brain When You’re Flooded

Allison Edwards explains how changing your senses can reset your brain.

What Happens In Your Brain When You’re Worried or Afraid

Allison Edwards explains how blood flow in your brain affects your decision-making

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Theta

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Zeta

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Epsilon

Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?

Words Within Words: ORNAMENT

How many words can you find within ORNAMENT?

Words Within Words: SCARECROW

How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?

Words Within Words: CRANBERRY

How many words can you find within “cranberry”?

The Heaviest Pumpkin

How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?

Squiggles Collection 3

Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?

Robot Writing: Acropolis

One painting of ruins. Three robots. Three pieces of writing. Who wrote it best?

Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)

Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Squiggles Collection 1

Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?

Squiggles Collection 2

Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?

What If… Unreliable Water?

What would the consequences be if a town’s tap water became… unreliable?

What If… Long Life?

What would the consequences be if all people lived much, much longer?

What If… No Sleep?

What would the consequences be if no one had to sleep anymore?

Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)

Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!

Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

Word Pyramids

Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?

Word Pyramid: U to Brush

Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?

Lipogram: Rewrite “Mary Had A Little Lamb”

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

How Many Will There Be? Chip Off The Block

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Phrases to Join a Discussion

Want your classroom discussions to go a bit more smoothly? Train students to use a few simple phrases and it’ll make all the difference in the world.

How Many Will There Be? Crosses

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Categorize and Re-Categorize Countries

Put these countries into groups. Then do it again. Then… do it one more time. How does re-re-grouping the same places reveal new patterns and give new insights?

Thanksgiving Photo Writing

Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.

Famous Structures

The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.

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!?

Olympics: Medals by Population

Do big countries always have the most medals? Which smaller countries rank surprisingly high in the Olympics?

Olympics: Winter vs Summer Medal Count

Which country has a great balance between their summer and winter Olympic medals?

Writing Concept Attainment Lessons

For Teachers

In a Concept Attainment lesson, we give students examples and non-examples of a concept — without telling them what that concept is!

Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

Horde Chess Variant

What if one player had, say, 32 pawns?

Tournament: 8 Wonders of the Solar System

Which location is the most wondrous place in the solar system?

Not Like The Others: Ants of the World!

Four ants from around the world. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

The 8th Wonder of the World Tournament

Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?

Precipitation Tournament

Eight types of precipitation battle it out in this tournament.

Parabolic Curve Art

Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.

Tournament of Ancient Inventions

Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?

Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests

For Teachers

Here are a bunch of ways to quickly practice creativity with your students for zero dollars.

Writing in Pilish

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

Not Like The Others: Stars

How is each of these stars not like the others?

Tournament of Presidents

So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?

Anti-Checkers

Sure, anyone can win at checkers… but can you lose!?

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!

Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe

What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?

Notice, Wonder: Green Circles

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

How Many Will There Be? Flowers

These flowers sure are getting bigger faster! How large will they be in step 10? What about step 50?

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?

Cram

Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!

Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Game: Number Scrabble

What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!

Word Ladder: Foot to Shoe (4 Steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

An Escher-Style Tessellation Project

Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!

Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)

Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.

Game: Snakes

In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?

Jotto

Who can guess the codeword first?

Math Game: Heaps

Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!

Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle

In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.

Word Ladders Introduction

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

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!

Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle

Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

Words Within Words: MENORAH

How many words can you find within MENORAH?

Remixing A Holiday Poem

Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!

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?

Math Curiosity: Goldbach’s Conjecture

Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!

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!

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.

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!

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.

How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus

How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?

Writing Sample: The Fall of the House of Usher

A passage from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

Game: Order and Chaos

Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!

Ghost

Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.

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.

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!

Paradox: Crocodile Dilemma

A crocodile makes a deal. But the deal creates a paradox. Can your students untangle a 2,000-year-old logic puzzle?

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!

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?

Chomp

Chomp away at your opponent in this grid-based strategy game.

Col – A Strategy Game

The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.

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 Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

Math Curiosity: Odds & Squares

Why does the sum of the first 5 odds also equal 5 squared?

Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle

What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?

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.

Math Curiosity: Waring’s Conjecture

So, can you write every odd (greater than 3) as the sum of three primes?

Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats

Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!

Math Curiosity: Twin Primes

What do you call two prime numbers who are very close together?

Academic Love Letters

What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?

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?

Percents and Credit Cards

Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?

Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles

Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.

Educational Valentines

Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!

How to Play Go

Ready to learn a 2,500-year-old Chinese board game? Let’s… Go!

Introduce Symbolism with Pixel Art

Create a pixelated icon that represents the essence of a character!

Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture

Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!

An App For A Historical Figure

What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?

Greekymon

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

Students and Personality Types

For Teachers

How can our students be so different? And how can we help them to understand themselves and each other better.

Motivation and Moral Development

Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?

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?

Teaching Empathy With Faberge Eggs

The story of the Fabergé Eggs is heartbreaking. It’s also the perfect way to build empathy in your classroom.

Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture

The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…

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?