← Back to all of your playlists

Playlist: Bookmarks

Adding and Subtracting Fruit

Use super cute fruit to introduce algebraic thinking to your young math students.

Back to School Math Worksheets

In these math problems, the solution is already given. But another number is missing!

OK Go Music Video on 64 Phones

A music video filmed on 64 phones and then displayed on 64 phones. What?

Optical Illusion: Two Tables

These two tables are the same size. But how!?

Tournament of Mythological Creatures

Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?

Improving These Novel Study Questions

For Teachers

Let’s fix these nine, underdeveloped discussion questions!

Factors and Codes (Episode 1)

Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.

Grouping Shapes by Parallel and Perpendicular Sides

Which shapes go together based on parallel and perpendicular lines?

Letters With Symmetry

Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!

Polar Weather Report

The North Pole hits -40°. The South Pole hits -60°. Calculate the averages, graph the data, and deliver your polar weather report.

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Squiggles Collection 1

Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?

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.

Greek and Latin Word Part Paths

How can we go from Biology to Immobile?

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.

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?

How Many Will There Be? Xs and Os

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Inferring With Art: A Man

What’s going on in this painting? Who is that guy? What’s his job? And where’s his other boot?

Game: Number Scrabble

What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!

Asynchrony (For Adults)

For Teachers

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

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.

Jotto

Who can guess the codeword first?

Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle

In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.

Word Ladders Introduction

You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.

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!?

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.

Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project

Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!

What’s In My Brain: Trapezoids or Not?

Which are trapezoids and which are not?

Fraction Ordering Tournament

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

Bulls and Cows

How quickly can you break the numeric code?

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!

Exponents – How Low Can They Go?

Using exponent patterns, can students predict what the 0th power will be?

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?

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?

Math Curiosity: The Coloring Problem

No video gets me more email from students! How few colors can you use to color in any map so that no two, neighboring regions are the same color?

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?

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.

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!

Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle

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

A Donut Investigation

In this cross-curricular investigation, students will look into an intriguing question: do donuts or salads have more sugar? They’ll grapple with misleading information, bias, and use their math skills to create a visual representation of sugar in popular foods.

What Do Mean and Median Mean?

When will mean and median give us different results?

Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?

Depth and Complexity: 👄 Language of the Discipline

Imagine a construction worker who doesn’t know the name of a screwdriver or a doctor who can’t remember what to call your neck. It’s pretty hard to communicate well without knowing the 👄 Language of the Discipline!

Introduce Symbolism with Pixel Art

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

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1

‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.

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.

The Game of 100

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

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.

Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?

What if you had an original iPod and sold it compared to if you had bought the equivalent amount of Apple stock and sold that?

Impostor Syndrome

For Teachers

The student who breezes through school may hit a wall in college. Here’s why — and what to do about it now.