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Playlist: Bookmarks

Founding The Colonies

13 colonies activities including a word search and task cards packed with facts. Plus, students will create their own colony with a name, story, and map!

Tournament of Not-So-Famous Inventors

Which inventor and invention will win the tournament?

Holiday Emoji Story 🎅

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)

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

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.

Famous Structures

The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.

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.

Writing in Pilish

Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?

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?

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?

Paradox: Rebuilding A Ship

What if we completely rebuild something slowly? What if we completely rebuild it all at once? Is it still the same thing?

Word Ladder: Two to Six (6-steps)

COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?

Game: Wild Tic Tac Toe

Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe, but both players can both play as both X and O throughout the whole game!

Word Ladders Introduction

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

Holiday vs Holiday (from a Mascot’s Perspective)

Want something to do during the holiday season that is both fun and involves thinking? Get students writing about what a snowman would think about Halloween or what a ghost would think about Thanksgiving.

Math Curiosity: Goldbach’s Conjecture

Can any even number be written as the sum of two primes? Goldbach thought so, but we haven’t proven it… yet!

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?

Not Like The Others: Charlotte’s Web

Four Charlotte’s Web characters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Not Like The Others: US Presidents

Four US presidents. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.

Game: Order and Chaos

Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!

Bulls and Cows

How quickly can you break the numeric code?

Sets of Idioms

Why do we say ‘break a leg’? Five themed sets of idioms your students will actually remember.

Student Introductions with Complexity and Frames

How have you changed over time? Students introduce themselves through the lens of change — and learn a Depth and Complexity tool in the process.

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?

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: Magic Squares

Imagine a 3×3 square in which every row, column, and diagonal have the same sum. That’s a magic square!

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?

Chomp

Chomp away at your opponent in this grid-based strategy game.

Col – A Strategy Game

The first person to run out of regions loses in this strategy game.

Game: Notakto

What if you only played Tic-Tac-Toe with Xs and you could play on multiple boards?

Dots and Boxes

Who can make the most boxes from dots in this strategy game?

Sprouts

Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.

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.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

Improving Presentations 4: The Big Day

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

Improving Presentations 3: The Storyboard and Slides

It’s time to turn that outline into a storyboard and then some actual slides.

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!

Math Curiosity: Finding Primes

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

Inductively Analyze Website Reliability

For Teachers

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

Educational Valentines

Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!

“Its Big Day” – A Children’s Story About Its and It’s

Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.

How to Play Go

Ready to learn a 2,500-year-old Chinese board game? Let’s… Go!

Introduce Symbolism with Pixel Art

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

Reduce Anxiety: Brain Plate (Tool 3)

When a student’s brain is full of worries, everything feels urgent. Brain Plate helps them sort what’s real from what’s noise — and actually do something about it.

Greekymon

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

Reduce Anxiety: Square Breathing (Tool 1)

Reduce anxiety by breathing in a square pattern.

Motivation and Moral Development

Can someone do the right thing, but for the wrong reason?

The Game of 100

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

Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture

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

Common English Words From Other Languages

Bored with typical spelling studies? Let’s dig into the origins of common English words from other languages!

Greek and Latin Dinosaur Names

Let’s create a new dinosaur using Greek and Latin stems!

Engineering: Build A Bridge

Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.

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.