Playlist: Bookmarks
New Uses For A Cardboard Tube
So, what can a cardboard tube be used for other than holding wrapping paper?
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Squiggles Introduction
What do you see in this squiggle?
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.
How Many Will There Be? Checkerboard
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Special Gifts with Special Requirements
Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!
Introducing Universal Theme of Power
So what could you do with a Universal Theme of Power? Well, here’s an introduction that will get your students’ brains sweating.
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Tournament of Presidents
So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?
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!
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
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.
Virtue or Vice?
Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.
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.
Not Like The Others: US Presidents
Four US presidents. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
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!
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?
Sprouts
Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.
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?
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.
Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle
What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… 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.
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Studying and Remixing “The Raven”
Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
How to Play Go
Ready to learn a 2,500-year-old Chinese board game? Let’s… Go!
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
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!
Intellectual Intensity
Do you know someone who becomes a bit overexcited by ideas?
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.