Playlist: Bookmarks
Natural Disasters Tournament
Earthquake vs. hurricane. Tsunami vs. wildfire. Students set the criteria, argue their case, and crown a champion. Warning: it gets heated.
Compare and Create New Year’s Traditions
Hey! Our New Year traditions have a lot in common.
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
The Heaviest Pumpkin
How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?
What If… Unreliable Water?
What would the consequences be if a town’s tap water became… unreliable?
An Olympic Sized Pool and 2 Liter Bottles (Episode 1)
How many 2 liter bottles could you fill up using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
Analyze Suffixes: -en
What exactly does adding -en to a word do? Find the pattern. Then find the words that break it.
How Many Will There Be? Chip Off The Block
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Special Gifts with Special Requirements
Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!
Not Like The Others: US National Parks
Four US national parks. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Concept Attainment: Hornet vs Tiger
Can your class spot the vertebrates vs invertebrates?
Olympics: Medals by Population
Do big countries always have the most medals? Which smaller countries rank surprisingly high in the Olympics?
Automobiles – Mixed Up Paragraph
Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about automobiles back into the correct order?
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
What’s In My Brain: Owl vs Eagle
Some of these animals are nocturnal and some are diurnal.
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.
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?
Writing Seuss Style Poetry
Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!
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!
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem
No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?
The Angles of a Triangle
Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?
Analyzing Movies’ Success
So should we make another movie in this series?
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
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!
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
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.
Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea
Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.
Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details
Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.
Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles
Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.
Furnishing A Hotel
Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.
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.