Playlist: Bookmarks
Holiday Shuffle – Day vs Date
Wouldn’t some holidays be better on a certain day of the week? Should Thanksgiving have a set date?
Thanksgiving Photo Writing
Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.
Chess Variant: Monster Chess
What if you had really weak chess pieces, but you could always move twice?
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!
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?
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.
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?
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.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Writing Clear Directions
Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?