Playlist: Bookmarks
Student Introductions With Depth, Complexity, and Frames: Level Two
Once students know the prompts of Depth and Complexity, let’s take them much higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Parts of Speech Party: Introduction (Check)
How many ways can we use “check” in a paragraph? And can your students spot when it’s a verb, or a noun, or an adjective?
Super Specific Similes – Slimy Broccoli
Start with a basic simile. Now make it more specific. Now even more. Watch how much better writing gets with each round.
What If… Unreliable Water?
What would the consequences be if a town’s tap water became… unreliable?
What If… Long Life?
What would the consequences be if all people lived much, much longer?
What If… No Sleep?
What would the consequences be if no one had to sleep anymore?
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!?
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
Fixing Shakespearean Run-Ons
Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.
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.
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?
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.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Run On or Not? – What’s In My Brain
Can your students spot the run-on sentences?
Complex or Compound – What’s In My Brain
Can your class spot the complex sentences vs compound sentences?
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!
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
What Would Poetry Think About Prose?
Poetry and Prose meet at a party. What would they say to each other? How would they feel about each other’s style?
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
Upgrading Compare and Contrast Writing
Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.
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.
Describing Author’s Voice
What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
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.
Propaganda and Logical Fallacies
Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.
Studying and Remixing “The Raven”
Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?
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.
Characters’ Talents and Multiple Intelligences
How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
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!