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Idioms About Names

Five idioms related to names.

Idioms About Bites

Five idioms related to bites.

Idioms About the Greeks and Romans

Five idioms related to the Greeks and Romans.

Idioms About Mouths

Five idioms related to mouths.

Idioms About Water

Five idioms related to water.

What’s In My Brain: Pentagon vs Pentagon

We’re looking at regular vs irregular polygons.

From “Too Many Choices” To “One Quality Task”

For Teachers

Fixing an under-developed (but interesting) task that was originally part of a choice menu.

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?

Types of Energy Tournament

Which type of energy will win the tournament!?

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.

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

Slow Motion Popcorn

What surprises can you spot when a kernel pops in super slow-mo?

Cooking In Space

Watch astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti cook a meal in zero gravity on the International Space Station.

Changing Baby Names

You won’t believe how fascinating it is to watch a map of the most popular baby names by US state.

Melting Ice Cream

Various desserts melt in surprisingly different ways.

Frozen Bubble

What happens when you blow a bubble in below-freezing temperatures?

Introduction to Puzzlements

For Teachers

How I accidentally discouraged curiosity in my classroom.

Words Within Words: SCARECROW

How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?

Updating Old Questions: Pay Raise

For Teachers

How I’d update a low-level, overly engaging math question.

Super Specific Similes: Quick Baby

Let’s make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.

Robot Writing: The Bridge

One painting of a bridge. Three robots. Who wrote it best?

What If… Long Life?

What would the consequences be if all people lived much, much longer?

Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

Idioms About Money

Five sets of idioms related to money.

Geometry Image: Steigerwald

What odd and interesting shapes can your students find in this geometric image?

Special Gifts with Special Requirements

Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!

Creativity Beyond The Fluff

For Teachers

Just because a task is “creative” doesn’t mean students are at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Writing Concept Attainment Lessons

For Teachers

In a Concept Attainment lesson, we give students examples and non-examples of a concept — without telling them what that concept is!

Racetrack – Race Around A Graph

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

Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

Notice, Wonder: Swirls

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

Rethinking Extension Menus

For Teachers

Is creating nine, two-sentence tasks really an effective way to differentiate?

Parabolic Curve Art

Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.

Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests

For Teachers

Here are a bunch of ways to quickly practice creativity with your students for zero dollars.

Brain Needs or Heart Needs

For Teachers

We think of gifted kids as only having academic needs, but – in their own words – they also have many needs of the heart.

Not Like The Others: Stars

How is each of these stars not like the others?

Looping Grid Art

Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!

How Many Will There Be? Sliced Circles

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

Notice, Wonder: Green Circles

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

How Many Will There Be? Flowers

These flowers sure are getting bigger faster! How large will they be in step 10? What about step 50?

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?

Complex Task: Academic Tournaments

For Teachers

Who would win in the Tournament of Least Useful Geometric Shapes or Bravest Shakespearean Characters? Create an academic tournament and watch your students’ brains sweat!

Cram

Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!

Fractions: Decompose and Recompose

What if we took a fraction apart, then took those pieces apart, then recombined them, and then recombined those, arriving back to the original fraction?

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!

The Pros and Cons of Producers and Consumers

Sure, students might know the difference between a producer and a consumer… but have they considered how they feel about each other? What, in a producer’s opinion, are the pros and cons of a consumer?

Measurement: A Long Movie

What if I told you a movie was a whopping 0.017 long? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? This lesson packs in strange measurements of time as well as tiny decimals.

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.

Game: Snakes

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

How Many Will There Be? Triangles Within Triangles

A triangle splits and splits and splits again. How many will there be in step 20?

Math Game: Heaps

Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!

Not Like The Others: States of Matter

How is each of the states of matter not like the others?

Notice, Wonder: A Long Line

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

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?

Evens and Odds – Addition and Subtraction

When we’re adding and subtracting, do evens make odds into evens? Do odds make evens odd? Which one has… more power!?

What If There Were No Hundreds Place?

Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?

Complex Task: What Would X Think of Y?

For Teachers

Here’s a simple task that will add complexity to any content from any grade level!

Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?

What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.

Exposing Students to Classics

For Teachers

Some kids hear Mozart at home. Others don’t. Let’s make sure every student gets exposed to the classics — art, music, and film.

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.

Depth and Complexity – An Introduction for Teachers

For Teachers

Depth and Complexity is the most powerful framework most teachers have never heard of. Here’s what it actually is — and isn’t.

What’s In My Brain: Trapezoids or Not?

Which are trapezoids and which are not?

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!

Ghost

Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.

Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles

Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?

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.

Undoing Multiplication With Division

Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!

Notice, Wonder: A Ship

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

Exponents – How Low Can They Go?

Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?

Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals

Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?

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?

Paradox: Crocodile Dilemma

A crocodile makes a deal. But the deal creates a paradox. Can your students untangle a 2,000-year-old logic puzzle?

Chomp

Chomp away at your opponent in this grid-based strategy game.

Col – A Strategy Game

The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.

Game: Notakto

What if you only played Tic-Tac-Toe with Xs and you could play on multiple boards?

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?

Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy

Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?

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.

Deducing the Area of Triangles

Using patterns, students try to deduce where that area formula came from.

Upgrading Compare and Contrast Writing

Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.

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!

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!

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.

What Do Mean and Median Mean?

When will mean and median give us different results?

Percents and Credit Cards

Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!

Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number

You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?

Educational Valentines

Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!

Running A Curiosity Based Research Project

Skip the assigned topics. Let students research what they’re genuinely curious about — here’s how to structure it so it actually works.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

How Many Students Can Fit On The Playground?

So… just how many kids could we cram onto the playground?

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?

Teaching Empathy With Faberge Eggs

The story of the Fabergé Eggs is heartbreaking. It’s also the perfect way to build empathy in your classroom.

Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture

The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…

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.

An Inductive Exploration Of Geometry

For Teachers

With inductive thinking, students will work from parts to whole, discovering big ideas along the way!

Introduction to Watercolor

For Teachers

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?

Think Like An Economist

How would an economist read Goldilocks? How would they see a rainforest? How would they study the American Revolution?

Can Students Solve Your Classroom Layout Problems?

For Teachers

What if your students designed your classroom layout?