Playlist: Bookmarks
Summer Activity Pack
A worksheet pack featuring writing prompts, a summer essay project, a science-based escape room activity, and image analysis prompts.
Two Animals Switch Biomes
What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?
What’s In My Brain: Ball vs Book
Let’s look at Kinetic vs Potential Energy!
Mother’s Day Cards
Let’s write the cleverest Mother’s Day cards you’ve ever seen!
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
Compare and Create New Year’s Traditions
Hey! Our New Year traditions have a lot in common.
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Idiom Tasks
Four fantastically terrific tasks for a weekly idiom study.
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.
Earthquakes – Mixed Up Paragraph
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about earthquakes back into the correct order?
Animal Adaptation Tournament
Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?
Not Like The Others: Types of Volcanoes
Which of these types of volcanoes is not like the others?
Writing About Art: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Look closely at Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Not Like The Others: Types of Rocks
Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic — and one that doesn’t fit. But which one? Depends on your argument.
Writing About Art: Twilight in the Wilderness
Look closely at Twilight in the Wilderness. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Antonym Paths
Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?
Fancier Figurative Language: Use the Opposite
Let’s start with “As cold as fire.”
Fancier Figurative Language: Move the Simile
What if we started a sentence with the simile?
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
Analyze Paragraphs: Baseball
Three paragraphs about baseball. They all cover the same topic — so what makes each one different? Now combine them into one super-paragraph.
Analyze Paragraphs: Cucumbers
Three paragraphs about cucumbers. They all cover the same topic — so what makes each one different? Now combine them into one super-paragraph.
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!
Changing Coordinating Conjunctions
What happens when we switch out a “but” with a “so”? An “and” with a “for”? How can such tiny words make such big differences?
12 Phrases: The Zoo
Students use 12 random phrases to create a story that takes place at the zoo.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
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.
Notice, Wonder: Michael
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Notice, Wonder: Etna
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!
A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.
Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats
Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!
Visualizing Fraction Multiplication
What does it look like to multiply fractions?
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
The Game of 100
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?