Playlist: Bookmarks
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?
Words Within Words: CORNMAZE
How many words can you find within CORNMAZE?
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
Special Gifts with Special Requirements
Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!
Thanksgiving Photo Writing
Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.
Olympics: Winter vs Summer Medal Count
Which country has a great balance between their summer and winter Olympic medals?
Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game
Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?
Parabolic Curve Art
Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.
Writing About Art: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Look closely at Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Writing About Art: Twilight in the Wilderness
Look closely at Twilight in the Wilderness. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
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?
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Measurement: A Long Movie
What if I told you a movie was a whopping 0.017 long? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? This lesson packs in strange measurements of time as well as tiny decimals.
Math Game: Heaps
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
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?
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
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!
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
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?
Passive to Active Voice
In this lesson, students will not just fix passive sentences, but break active sentences as they learn to put the star of the sentence first.
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.
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
Ways to Start a Sentence – Part 3
Your students’ sentences all start the same way. Here are three techniques that fix that overnight.
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.
Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture
The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…