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Playlist: Bookmarks

Characters’ Faults Can Also Be Strengths

Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.

Comparing Characters’ Bedrooms

What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?

Greekymon Studies – Round 1

What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

What If… Long Life?

What would the consequences be if all people lived much, much longer?

Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)

Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!

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?

Analyze Characters Using Philosophy

What is the Brick Pig’s philosophy? How would he apply it to the characters in Harry Potter?

Writing About Art: The Scream

Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.

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?

Word Ladder: Two to Six (6-steps)

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

Word Ladder – Cold to Cool (5-Steps)

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

Word Ladder: Fast to Race (4 step)

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

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?

Inferring With Art: A Couple

What’s going on in this room? There are shoes everywhere! Are those… oranges? Let’s make some inferences!

Inferring With Art: Two Women

What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!

Changing Coordinating Conjunctions

What happens when we switch out a “but” with a “so”? An “and” with a “for”? How can such tiny words make such big differences?

Word Ladders Introduction

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

Writing A Thanksgiving Letter

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

Remixing A Holiday Poem

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

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.

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?

Virtue or Vice?

Aristotle noted that positive traits and negative traits are often the same thing, but just in different amounts. The right amount is a virtue, but too much or too little and it’s a vice.

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.

Writing Seuss Style Poetry

Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

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

Not Like The Others: Charlotte’s Web

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

Writing Sample: The Fall of the House of Usher

A passage from “The Fall of the House of Usher” to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

Bulls and Cows

How quickly can you break the numeric code?

Simple or Compound Sentences – What’s In My Brain?

Can your students spot simple sentences vs compound sentences?

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.

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.

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.

Academic Love Letters

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

Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos

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

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.

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!

Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1

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

Greekymon

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

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Nothing could possibly go wrong with a love potion on the loose!

Writing Summaries in Haiku

Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.

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…

Response to Lit: An Inductive Approach

For Teachers

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

Can Students Solve Your Classroom Layout Problems?

For Teachers

What if your students designed your classroom layout?