Playlist: Bookmarks
Word Ladder: Fly to Bee (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
What’s In My Brain: Coral vs Water Lilies
Let’s look at saltwater vs freshwater organisms.
Domesticated Animals Tournament
Which domesticated animal will win the tournament?
Squiggles Collection 1
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
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?
Notice, Wonder: Skylight
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Notice, Wonder: Witch’s Fingers
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
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?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Fast to Race (4 step)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Sky to Red (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Foot to Shoe (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.
Subtraction: 3 Digits Minus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit subtraction.
Game: Snakes
In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
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?
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!
Notice, Wonder: Climber
A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Math Curiosity: Magic Squares
Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!
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!
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.
Characters’ Talents and Multiple Intelligences
How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
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?
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.