Playlist: Bookmarks

Peacock Spider Dance

Broken Calculator: Multiplication Cross Product

Broken Calculator: 2-Digit Subtraction

What’s In My Brain: H vs Arrow

Two columns. One is an example, one isn’t. Can you figure out the hidden rule before the big reveal?

What’s In My Brain: Paperclip vs Straw

We’re looking at magnetic vs. non-magnetic materials.

Halloween Problems and Solutions

When we try to solve a problem, sometimes we end up creating new problems. Which lead to new solutions. Which lead to new problems.

Words Within Words: RAINBOW

How many words can you find within rainbow?

Getting Specific With St. Patrick’s Day Writing

Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!

Tournament of Mythological Creatures

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

What’s In My Brain: Pentagon vs Pentagon

We’re looking at regular vs irregular polygons.

What’s In My Brain: Coral vs Water Lilies

Let’s look at saltwater vs freshwater organisms.

Holiday 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.

Mother’s Day Cards

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

Factors and Codes (Episode 1)

Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.

Grouping Shapes by Parallel and Perpendicular Sides

Which shapes go together based on parallel and perpendicular lines?

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.

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

Words Within Words: ORNAMENT

How many words can you find within ORNAMENT?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong

Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?

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?

Random Emoji Prompt Generator

Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.

How Many Will There Be? Earthworm

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

How Many Will There Be? Courtyard

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

Looking Closely at Holiday Photos

Let’s write from multiple perspectives using an old timey holiday photo!

Special Gifts with Special Requirements

Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!

Not Like The Others: US National Parks

Four US national parks. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

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!?

Racetrack – Race Around A Graph

How fast do you get your mathematical car going without crashing?

Plant Adaptation Tournament

Who will win in a tournament of eight plants with Interesting adaptations!?

Microchess (Chess Variant)

What if we played chess on a board that’s only 4×5?

Tournament of Ancient Inventions

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

Animal Adaptation Tournament

Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?

Writing in Pilish

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

New Uses for a Paperclip

So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?

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?

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?

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!

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!

Game: Snakes

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

Story Starter: A Day At School

Students use 12 random phrases to create a story that takes place at school.

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

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

Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)

Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.

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.

Writing Seuss Style Poetry

Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!

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!

How Renewable Is That Resource?

Which resource is more renewable? And which is easier to find?

Not Like The Others: Planets

Which of these planets is not like others? Well, it sure looks simple at first. But each option could be the one that doesn’t fit in.

Game: Order and Chaos

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

Writing A Story About Fraction Equivalence

When fractions take on a new denominator, it’s as if they’re wearing a disguise – same value, new look. So let’s write a story about fraction equivalence starring a fraction who needs to fit in with a new group.

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!

Rounding Numbers (But Not To 10)

What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?

Dots and Boxes

Who can make the most boxes from dots 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!

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.)

Building Creative Analogies

We’ll take two seemingly unrelated pieces of content (say volcanoes and the human body) and then build analogies to connect the two ideas. In the end, students can create a skit, comic, or story relating the two concepts.

Finding The Volume of Laptops

How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!

Investigating Cost of Living

Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?

The Thinking Hats

So… do your students moan when forced to work in a group? Part of the problem is that lack the structure to work well with peers. Edward de Bono’s Thinking Hats are a perfect tool to help with this problem.

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.

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.

Math Curiosity: Waring’s Conjecture

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

A Caffeine Investigation – Part 3

Caffeine is everywhere. But what are the ads really saying? Analyze the claims, then create your own public service announcement.

A Caffeine Investigation – Part 2

What do people know about the amount of caffeine in common beverages?

A Caffeine Investigation – Part 1

So… just how much caffeine can you have before you end up in the ER?

Math Curiosity: Finding Primes

Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!

Math Curiosity: Twin Primes

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

Depth and Complexity: 👓 Multiple Perspectives

Every topic looks different depending on who’s looking. This prompt teaches students to see through someone else’s eyes.

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.

Create A Creature

Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.

An App For A Historical Figure

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

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1

‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.

A Nutrition-Based Math Project

Let’s create a parody ad attacking a surprisingly calorie-rich meal.

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?

A Grid-Based Fraction Project

You’ve got 60 spaces on a grid to create an amusement park, a house, a farm, or whatever you’d like. Divide it into seven pieces, order it by size, combine into two halves, and more in this fraction project.

Introduction to Watercolor

A mosaic technique that makes watercolor approachable. Students walk away with something they’re proud of.

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?

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.

Engineering: Build A Bridge

Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.

Better Stories Part 2: Types of Conflict

If your students’ stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it’s time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.

Better Stories Part 3: Literary Themes

A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes in…

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.

Better Stories Part 4: Character Archetypes

Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.