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Playlist: Bookmarks

OK Go Music Video on 64 Phones

A music video filmed on 64 phones and then displayed on 64 phones. What?

Two Animals Switch Biomes

What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?

Holiday Shuffle – Day vs Date

Wouldn’t some holidays be better on a certain day of the week? Should Thanksgiving have a set date?

Halloween Problems and Solutions

When we try to solve a problem, sometimes we end up creating new problems. Which lead to new solutions. Which lead to new problems.

Words Within Words: PATRICK

How many words can you find within Patrick?

Tournament of Mythological Creatures

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

New Uses For A Cardboard Tube

So, what can a cardboard tube be used for other than holding wrapping paper?

Order, Chaos, and the Holiday Season

Let’s write a holiday song about order and chaos!

Holiday Emoji Story ⛷️

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Holiday Emoji Story 🚚

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Halloween Emoji Story 🎃

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Emoji Stories 🤖

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Great Sloths – Mixed Up Paragraph

Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about great sloths back into the correct order?

Greekymon Studies – Round 3

What might a creature named “Aquacornus Rex” be like?

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

Compare and Create New Year’s Traditions

Hey! Our New Year traditions have a lot in common.

Words Within Words: ORNAMENT

How many words can you find within ORNAMENT?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

Words Within Words: SCARECROW

How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?

Words Within Words: CRANBERRY

How many words can you find within “cranberry”?

Words Within Words: STUFFING

How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.

The Heaviest Pumpkin

How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?

A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong

Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?

Squiggles Collection 3

Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

How To Let Your Brain Exhale

For Teachers

As a teacher, I was constantly inhaling new ideas. I became overwhelmed. Then, because I was overwhelmed, I’d inhale more ideas – hoping to find a solution to my overwhelmedness. What I needed to do was let my brain exhale.

Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)

How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?

Words Within Words: TEACHER

How many words can you find within TEACHER?

Random Emoji Prompt Generator

Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.

How Many Will There Be? Checkerboard

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

Thanksgiving Photo Writing

Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.

Famous Structures

The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.

Models of Instruction: Inquiry Training

For Teachers

Want your students to ask better questions? Why not train them to inquire!?

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!?

Concept Attainment: Hornet vs Tiger

Can your class spot the vertebrates vs invertebrates?

Analyze Suffixes: -ly, -less, and -ful

What exactly does adding -less do to a word?

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!

An Introduction to Models of Instruction

For Teachers

As a new teacher, I only knew one model of instruction: Direct Instruction. I was like a chef who only knew how to deep fry!

Notice, Wonder: Butterball

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

Automobiles – Mixed Up Paragraph

Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about automobiles back into the correct order?

Words Within Words: AIRPLANE

How many words can you find within airplane?

Notice, Wonder: Swirls

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

New Uses for a Paperclip

So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?

Tournament of Presidents

So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?

Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe

What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?

Writing About Art: The Scream

Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.

How Many Will There Be? Desks

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

Cram

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

Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Word Ladder: Fast to Race (4 step)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Game: Wild Tic Tac Toe

Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe, but both players can both play as both X and O throughout the whole game!

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!

Word Ladder: Kid to Old (5-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

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.

Word Ladders Introduction

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

Remixing A Holiday Poem

Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!

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?

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?

SCAMPER: Scaffolding Creativity

Asking students to “think creatively” won’t get you far. They won’t know how to start, they’ll get stuck with simple ideas, or they’ll just go completely wild. SCAMPER is a tool for scaffolding the process of creativity.

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!

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.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.

Bulls and Cows

How quickly can you break the numeric code?

Investigating Christmas Trees

Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?

Parts of Speech Party – Thanks

How many different ways can we use the word “thanks”? Let’s find out in this Parts of Speech Party!

Student Introductions with Complexity and Frames

How have you changed over time? Students introduce themselves through the lens of change — and learn a Depth and Complexity tool in the process.

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!

Math Curiosity: Four Squares

Every positive integer can be written as the sum of (at most) four perfect squares!

Math Curiosity: Magic Squares

Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!

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?

Game: Notakto

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

Sprouts

Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.

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?

The Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

More Specific than “Smart”

When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)

Synonym Graphs

So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?

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.

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.

Showing A Character’s Trait

We tell students to ‘show, not tell’ — but that advice is useless until they experience the difference. This lesson makes it click.

Differentiate With Frames Across Disciplines

For Teachers

One topic, four angles. The Frame graphic organizer gives every student a different way in — without you creating four different lessons.

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.

Curriculum Compacting

For Teachers

Shrink the curriculum down to what students actually need to learn. Then use the freed-up time for something better.

Historic Social Media

How would people from history have interacted online? Students will develop a conversation online between people involved in the same event from history.

Educational Valentines

Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

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

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 2

We’ll show students how to add more variety to their writing by starting sentences with a reason, a prepositional phrase, and a simile.

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1

‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.

Greekymon

Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.

Reduce Anxiety: Square Breathing (Tool 1)

Reduce anxiety by breathing in a square pattern.

Students and Personality Types

For Teachers

How can our students be so different? And how can we help them to understand themselves and each other better.

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?

Writing Summaries in Haiku

Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.

Impostor Syndrome

For Teachers

The student who breezes through school may hit a wall in college. Here’s why — and what to do about it now.

Better Stories Part 1: The Big Idea

We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.