Playlist: Bookmarks
Tournament of Not-So-Famous Inventors
Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Van Gogh Self-Portrait Tournament
Who will win the tournament of Van Gogh self-portraits!?
Think Like An Author: Hemingway vs Dickens
What if your students rewrote Dickens in the style of Hemingway and vice versa?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Animal Adaptation Tournament
Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?
Parts of Speech Tournament
Which part of speech is most useful? Interesting? Strange?
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
Antonym Paths
Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
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?
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.
Fixing Shakespearean Run-Ons
Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.
Ambiguous Sentences
Rather than just demand that students “write clearly,” we’ll explore the hazards of poorly written sentences… and maybe create one of our own!
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.
How Many Ways: Fraction Equivalence
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Times
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
The Tournament of Biomes
Want to move beyond memorizing the characteristics of biomes? In this lesson, students work through a Tournament of Biomes, explaining which biome wins in each round (based on criteria you choose). In the end, they crown a 👑 Champion Biome!
Advanced Alliteration and Consonance
When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
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!
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.
What Does it Cost to Fill a Car with Other Liquids
Is gas actually that expensive? What if we filled a car up with… orange juice?
Propaganda and Logical Fallacies
Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.
What Do Mean and Median Mean?
When will mean and median give us different results?
Studying and Remixing “The Raven”
Ready to push kids beyond the boring, old ABAB rhyme scheme and into something a bit more complex?
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes
Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?
Create A Creature
Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
Common English Words From Other Languages
Bored with typical spelling studies? Let’s dig into the origins of common English words from other languages!
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?