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What’s In My Brain: Guinea Pig vs Potbelly

What do guinea pigs, shooting stars, and seahorses have in common? They’re all misnomers!

Random Emoji Prompt Generator

Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.

Back to School: Rewriting The Beatles’ “Help!”

Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?

Olympics: Winter vs Summer Medal Count

Which country has a great balance between their summer and winter Olympic medals?

Introducing Universal Theme of Change

Everything changes. But how does it change? Students brainstorm dozens of examples and boil them down to one big idea.

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.

My Top 5 Depth and Complexity Mistakes

For Teachers

I spent about a decade making some pretty major mistakes in my use of depth and complexity.

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.

Unexpected Intensities

For Teachers

Do you know a student who’s a little bit… intense?

Think Like A Historian

Here’s how effects be causes and causes can be effects!

Why “Challenging” May Not Be The Right Goal

For Teachers

So many of us say, “I want to challenge my students!” But, would you want a job that you describe as “challenging”?

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?

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?

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.

Subtraction: 3 Digits Minus 2 Digits (Single Solution)

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.

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.

Remixing A Holiday Poem

Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!

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?

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!

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.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

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

How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus

How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?

Fraction Ordering Tournament

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

Writing A Story About Fraction Equivalence

When fractions take on a new denominator, it’s as if they’re wearing a disguise – same value, new look. So let’s write a story about fraction equivalence starring a fraction who needs to fit in with a new group.

Intersecting Angles and Streets

There can never be just one angle.

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?

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!

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 Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

The Angles of a Triangle

Why tell a kid the rules of a triangle when they can discover them!?

Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!

A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.

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.

Finding The Volume of Laptops

How has the volume of laptops changed over time? You know you want to check out how huge those first versions were!

Describing Author’s Voice

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

Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle

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

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.

What Do Mean and Median Mean?

When will mean and median give us different results?

Developing Extension Questions: Zooming In

Every topic has details that get glossed over in a sentence. Zoom in on one and you’ve got an entire unit hiding inside a paragraph.

Improving Presentations 4: The Big Day

How do you mentally (and emotionally) prepare yourself for the big day?

Improving Presentations 2: Planning The Outline

After watching some great presenters, let’s outline your presentation!

Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats

Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!

Academic Love Letters

What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?

Visualizing Fraction Multiplication

What does it look like to multiply fractions?

Percents and Credit Cards

Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!

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?

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.

Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes

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

Educational Valentines

Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!

Characters’ Talents and Multiple Intelligences

How do characters from novels line up with Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences?

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.

Teach Non-Fiction Writing Structure With Fractals

Did you ever notice that the structure of an essay is very similar to the structure of a paragraph? Hmm…

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

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

An Inductive Exploration Of Geometry

For Teachers

With inductive thinking, students will work from parts to whole, discovering big ideas along the way!

Response to Lit: An Inductive Approach

For Teachers

Here’s how one teacher uses inductive thinking to help students respond to literature.

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?

Multiple Perspectives in Primary

For Teachers

Even our youngest students can learn to think from multiple perspectives!

Add Layers To Direct Instruction

For Teachers

Take direction instruction beyond a monotonous practice of the same skill over and over.

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.