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Summer Activity Pack

A worksheet pack featuring writing prompts, a summer essay project, a science-based escape room activity, and image analysis prompts.

A Land Octopus

The only type of octopus that routinely wanders onto land!

Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)

How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?

A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong

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

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Word Pyramids

Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?

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.

Special Gifts with Special Requirements

Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!

Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

The 8th Wonder of the World Tournament

Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?

New Uses for a Paperclip

So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?

Addressing Disorganization

For Teachers

Know any kids who, despite their brilliant minds, have a bit of a hard time keeping things in order, turning things in on time, or remembering to put their names on their papers?

Complex Task: Academic Tournaments

For Teachers

Who would win in the Tournament of Least Useful Geometric Shapes or Bravest Shakespearean Characters? Create an academic tournament and watch your students’ brains sweat!

Fractions: Decompose and Recompose

What if we took a fraction apart, then took those pieces apart, then recombined them, and then recombined those, arriving back to the original fraction?

An Escher-Style Tessellation Project

Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!

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.

Math Game: Heaps

Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?

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?

Generalization: Change Leads to More Change

Can you think of a time in your life when “Change lead to more change?”

Invisible Power Can Have Visible Effects

Can you think of times when power is unseen, but we can clearly see its effects?

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.

Running A “Notice, Wonder” Lesson

For Teachers

Use these puzzling images to build a classroom culture that is comfortable with curiosity, ambiguity, and taking intellectual risks.

Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?

What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.

Notice, Wonder: The Cliff

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

Fraction Ordering Tournament

Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!

Intersecting Angles and Streets

There can never be just one angle.

Upgrade Research Questions With Depth and Complexity

Ever ask students to create research questions? Were their ideas a bit… blah? My own students had a very hard time writing questions they didn’t already know the answer to! This video is how I solved that problem: upgrade research questions with depth and complexity.

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!

Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals

Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?

Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy

Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?

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.

Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle

What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?

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.

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.

Visualizing Fraction Multiplication

What does it look like to multiply fractions?

Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number

You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?

A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions

Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?

Inductively Analyze Website Reliability

For Teachers

Rather than giving students rules to apply to websites, let them analyze websites to create rules.

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?

Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles

Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

How Many Students Can Fit On The Playground?

So… just how many kids could we cram onto the playground?

Greekymon

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

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!

The Game of 100

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

Teaching Empathy With Faberge Eggs

The story of the Fabergé Eggs is heartbreaking. It’s also the perfect way to build empathy in your classroom.

Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture

The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…

Furnishing A Hotel

Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.

A Grid-Based Fraction Project

You’ve got 60 spaces on a grid to create an amusement park, a house, a farm, or whatever you’d like. Divide it into seven pieces, order it by size, combine into two halves, and more in this fraction project.

New Uses for Everyday Things

For Teachers

Here’s how Joelle Trayers gets even her youngest students ready to think in unexpected ways.

Better Stories Part 5: Plot Structure

Ever read a student’s story that was just event after event after event and then a very sudden ending? They lack an understanding of a plot’s structure. With the help of Finding Nemo, I break down how to set up a well-structured plot.

Intellectual Intensity

Do you know someone who becomes a bit overexcited by ideas?

Better Stories Part 2: Types of Conflict

If your students’ stories are packed with endless ninja fights or arguments between frenemies, it’s time to expose them to a wider range of conflicts.

Better Stories Part 3: Literary Themes

A typical student narrative includes plot and characters but lacks a larger idea to hold it all together. This is where a lesson on themes comes in…

Better Stories Part 1: The Big Idea

We open our unit on narrative writing with a big idea: “structure increases creativity.” I show how this is true by bringing in examples from across all disciplines.

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.