Playlist: Bookmarks
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.
Robot Writing: Acropolis
One painting of ruins. Three robots. Three pieces of writing. Who wrote it best?
Words Within Words: TEACHER
How many words can you find within TEACHER?
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?
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.
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
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.
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.
How Renewable Is That Resource?
Which resource is more renewable? And which is easier to find?
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!
Advanced Alliteration and Consonance
When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Run On or Not? – What’s In My Brain
Can your students spot the run-on sentences?
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
More Specific than “Smart”
When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)
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.
Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats
Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!
Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea
Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.
Asynchrony: Developing At Different Rates (For Students)
For students! In some areas, a student may be shockingly advanced, while in others… surprisingly average. This is asynchrony in action.
Motivation and Moral Development
Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
Better Stories Part 5: Plot Structure
Ever read a student’s story that was just event after event after event and then a very sudden ending? They lack an understanding of a plot’s structure. With the help of Finding Nemo, I break down how to set up a well-structured plot.
Intellectual Intensity
Do you know someone who becomes a bit overexcited by ideas?
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.