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Playlist: Bookmarks

Drawing A 3D Staircase

This optical illusion looks like a 3D staircase, but it’s all drawn on a plain piece of paper.

Greekymon Studies – Round 1

What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?

Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles

Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)

How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?

Differentiate with Low Floors and High Ceilings

For Teachers

Stop starting at grade level and stretching up. Start high and scaffold down. It’s simpler, and it actually works.

Special Gifts with Special Requirements

Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!

Writing Concept Attainment Lessons

For Teachers

In a Concept Attainment lesson, we give students examples and non-examples of a concept — without telling them what that concept is!

Greek and Latin Word Part Paths

How can we go from Biology to Immobile?

Parabolic Curve Art

Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.

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? Sliced Circles

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

How Many Will There Be? Flowers

These flowers sure are getting bigger faster! How large will they be in step 10? What about step 50?

An Escher-Style Tessellation Project

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

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 Game: Heaps

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

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.

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.

Depth and Complexity – An Introduction for Teachers

For Teachers

Depth and Complexity is the most powerful framework most teachers have never heard of. Here’s what it actually is — and isn’t.

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?

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.

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!

Paradox: The Liar’s Paradox

Nothing like a paradox to get your kids brains exploding 🤯! This one starts with five simple words: “This statement is a lie.”

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!

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.

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: Primes and Squares

Can any perfect square be written as the sum of two primes?

Math Curiosity: Finding Primes

Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!

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?

Creating A Realistic Flower and Pollinator

Your students will create a new flower, designed to attract a specific pollinator.

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.

Greekymon

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

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.

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.