Playlist: Bookmarks
Two Animals Switch Biomes
What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?
Letters With Symmetry
Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!
Animal Adaptation Tournament
Which animal has the most interesting, most valuable, or strangest adaptations?
Antonym Paths
Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?
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?
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!
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!?
Punctuation Power
In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!
Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?
Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
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?
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?
Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy
Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?
Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!
A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.
Analyzing Movies’ Success
So should we make another movie in this series?
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.
Creating A Realistic Flower and Pollinator
Your students will create a new flower, designed to attract a specific pollinator.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.