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Characters’ Faults Can Also Be Strengths

Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.

Notice, Wonder: Brooklyn

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

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: RAINBOW

How many words can you find within rainbow?

Getting Specific With St. Patrick’s Day Writing

Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!

Change A Story’s Genre

What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?

From “Too Many Choices” To “One Quality Task”

For Teachers

Fixing an under-developed (but interesting) task that was originally part of a choice menu.

How to Reset Your Brain When You’re Flooded

Allison Edwards explains how changing your senses can reset your brain.

Parts of Speech Party: Introduction (Check)

How many ways can we use “check” in a paragraph? And can your students spot when it’s a verb, or a noun, or an adjective?

A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong

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

Super Specific Similes: Quick Baby

Let’s make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.

Robot Writing: The Bridge

One painting of a bridge. Three robots. Who wrote it best?

Moving Students from “On-Level” to “Advanced” in Writing

For Teachers

What separates our on-level writers from our advanced writers?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

What If… No Sleep?

What would the consequences be if no one had to sleep anymore?

New Uses For A Chair

So, what can a chair be used for other than, you know, sitting in?

Graphic Organizers and Higher Order Thinking

For Teachers

A few quick tips on how to better use graphic organizers to support higher-order thinking.

Lipogram: Rewrite “Mary Had A Little Lamb”

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”

What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?

Phrases to Join a Discussion

Want your classroom discussions to go a bit more smoothly? Train students to use a few simple phrases and it’ll make all the difference in the world.

Introducing Universal Theme of Power

So what could you do with a Universal Theme of Power? Well, here’s an introduction that will get your students’ brains sweating.

Not Like The Others: Penguins

Four penguins. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests

For Teachers

Here are a bunch of ways to quickly practice creativity with your students for zero dollars.

Brain Needs or Heart Needs

For Teachers

We think of gifted kids as only having academic needs, but – in their own words – they also have many needs of the heart.

New Uses for a Paperclip

So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?

Analyze Characters Using Philosophy

What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?

Notice, Wonder: Green Circles

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

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?

Inferring With Art: A Couple

What’s going on in this room? There are shoes everywhere! Are those… oranges? Let’s make some inferences!

Inferring With Art: Two Women

What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!

Changing Coordinating Conjunctions

What happens when we switch out a “but” with a “so”? An “and” with a “for”? How can such tiny words make such big differences?

Fixing Shakespearean Run-Ons

Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.

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?

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.

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!

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!

Plurals: An Inductive Spelling Lesson

Plural nouns in English are deliciously fascinating. Yet most plural lessons are so dull! In this experience, students are given a pile of plurals and then inductively create groups and pull out rules and patterns.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

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

Writing Sample: The Fall of the House of Usher

A passage from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

Do Narrators Have Too Much Power?

Imagine being a character in a story. Are you worried that your story’s narrator may inaccurately describe you? What if they reveal something you wanted to be kept secret? Do narrators have too much power!?

Simple or Compound Sentences – What’s In My Brain?

Can your students spot simple sentences vs compound sentences?

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!

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.)

Upgrading Compare and Contrast Writing

Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.

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.

Describing Author’s Voice

What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?

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.

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.

Propaganda and Logical Fallacies

Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.

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.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

Universal Themes

For Teachers

Universal Themes are an easy way to connect lessons, units, and content areas, even going across grade levels, and into students’ personal interests.

Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats

Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!

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?

Depth and Complexity: ❓ Unanswered Questions

This underutilized tool focuses students on what we don’t yet know and even what we can’t know.

Depth and Complexity: ⚖️ Ethics

Want to add drama to any topic? Use the Ethics prompt!

Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea

Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.

Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details

Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.

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.

Elements of The Fantasy Genre

Every fantasy story has patterns hiding underneath the magic. Once your students see the elements, they’ll spot them everywhere — and use them in their own writing.

“Its Big Day” – A Children’s Story About Its and It’s

Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.

Introduce Symbolism with Pixel Art

Create a pixelated icon that represents the essence of a character!

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 – 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.

Reduce Anxiety: Brain Plate (Tool 3)

When a student’s brain is full of worries, everything feels urgent. Brain Plate helps them sort what’s real from what’s noise — and actually do something about it.

Greekymon

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

Reduce Anxiety: Change The Channel (Tool 2)

Reduce anxiety by learning to “change the channel.”

Reduce Anxiety: Square Breathing (Tool 1)

Reduce anxiety by breathing in a square pattern.

Asynchrony: Developing At Different Rates (For Students)

For students! In some areas, a student may be shockingly advanced, while in others… surprisingly average. This is asynchrony in action.

Motivation and Moral Development

Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?

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!

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.

Teaching Criticism

For Teachers

Ask students to go beyond “I don’t like it” and form critical opinions based on a set of criteria. Students can produce written arguments or turn their opinion into oral presentations.

Ethics In The Young Elementary Classroom

For Teachers

Can kindergartners discuss ethical issues? Yes. Here’s how to weave multiple-perspective problems throughout your curriculum.