Playlist: Bookmarks
Tournament of Not-So-Famous Inventors
Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?
Greekymon Studies – Round 1
What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?
Robot Writing: The Bridge
One painting of a bridge. Three robots. Who wrote it best?
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Prefixes and Suffixes in Other Languages
Let’s go beyond merely memorizing word parts and instead analyze across languages. How do other languages make a word the opposite?
Notice, Wonder: Bloom
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?
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.
Analyze Paragraphs: Wolverines
Three paragraphs about wolverines. 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?
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Investigating Christmas Trees
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
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!
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?
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.
Climbing Bloom’s with Depth and Complexity
For TeachersBloom’s tells you how high to aim. Depth and Complexity tells you where to look. Combine them and things get interesting.
Analyze Character Change with Depth and Complexity
Your students will use Depth and Complexity to note how a character’s main trait changes across a story.
Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles
Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.
Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs
Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Teach Non-Fiction Writing Structure With Fractals
Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmm…
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…