Playlist: Bookmarks
Adding and Subtracting Fruit
Use super cute fruit to introduce algebraic thinking to your young math students.
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?
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?
Halloween Emoji Story 🎃
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Psycholunaphase (Greek and Latin)
What on earth is a Psycholunaphase? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent the creature, device, or spell it describes.
Factors and Codes: First Names (Episode 2)
Scrambled up somewhere in 161,000 is a first name. Can you find it!?
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Compare and Create New Year’s Traditions
Hey! Our New Year traditions have a lot in common.
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Squiggles Collection 1
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Zig Zag Cipher (Codes Part 3)
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Special Gifts with Special Requirements
Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!
Famous Structures
The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.
Create A Civilization: Currency
What type of currency will your civilization use? What symbols will be on it? Why are they significant?
Create A Civilization: Design A Flag
What makes for a good flag? What makes a bad flag?
Tournament of Presidents
So who was the strangest of these eight presidents?
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!?
Create Your Own Operation
The commutative and associative properties are a whole lot more interesting when you apply them to a mathematical operation that you created!
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.
Create A Civilization: A Change In Government
It’s a great moment for your civilization! Power is moving from the hands of a few to a more democratic government.
Undoing Multiplication With Division
Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!
Exponents – How Low Can They Go?
Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?
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!
Rounding Numbers (But Not To 10)
What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?
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?
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
Analyzing Movies’ Success
So should we make another movie in this series?
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!
Create A Civilization: Calendars
Why 12 months? Why 30ish days? Why 7 days in a week? Your civilization could organize a year in any way you want!
Create A Civilization: From Hunter Gatherers to Farmers
What happens when your civilization suddenly has a surplus of food? Think of the possibilities!
Create A Civilization: The River
The Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Seine, the Thames, and now… your river!
Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details
Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
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!