Playlist: Bookmarks
Antagonyms: Dust, Clip, and Left
Dust can mean “remove dust” but also “add more dust!”
Tournament of Mythological Creatures
Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?
What’s In My Brain: Coral vs Water Lilies
Let’s look at saltwater vs freshwater organisms.
What’s In My Brain: Ball vs Book
Let’s look at Kinetic vs Potential Energy!
Greekymon Studies – Round 1
What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?
Cooking In Space
Watch astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti cook a meal in zero gravity on the International Space Station.
Super Specific Similes: Quick Baby
Let’s make this simile about a quick baby even more specific.
New Uses For A Chair
So, what can a chair be used for other than, you know, sitting in?
Idiom Tasks
Four fantastically terrific tasks for a weekly idiom study.
An Olympic Sized Pool and 2 Liter Bottles (Episode 1)
How many 2 liter bottles could you fill up using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
Analyze Suffixes: -en
What exactly does adding -en to a word do? Find the pattern. Then find the words that break it.
Not Like The Others: US National Parks
Four US national parks. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Stories with the Same Problems and Solutions
Have you ever noticed that some stories have awfully similar problems? What if we looked for the most unusual way of solving a repeating problem?
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Find The Pattern: Multiply Fractions
What if you set the stage for students to discover how to multiply fractions?
Analyze Suffixes: -ly, -less, and -ful
What exactly does adding -less do to a word?
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Tournament of Ancient Inventions
Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?
Parts of Speech Tournament
Which part of speech is most useful? Interesting? Strange?
Brain Needs or Heart Needs
For TeachersWe think of gifted kids as only having academic needs, but – in their own words – they also have many needs of the heart.
Analyze Characters Using Philosophy
What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?
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: How Old Is Mr. Byrd?
What if I told you that I’m 341,640 old? Could you figure out what unit I’m using? Hint: it’s not years!
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.
Subtraction: 3 Digits Minus 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 subtraction.
Game: Snakes
In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
Not Like The Others: Countries
How is each of these four countries not like the others?
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
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!
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.
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
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?
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!
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
What Would Poetry Think About Prose?
Poetry and Prose meet at a party. What would they say to each other? How would they feel about each other’s style?
The Angles of a Triangle
Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?
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.)
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.
Synonym Graphs
So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?
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.
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Math Curiosity: Twin Primes
What do you call two prime numbers who are very close together?
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.
Characters’ Talents and Multiple Intelligences
How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche
We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.
Greek and Latin Dinosaur Names
Let’s create a new dinosaur using Greek and Latin stems!
Better Stories Part 4: Character Archetypes
Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.