Playlist: Bookmarks
Word Ladder: Fly to Bee (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Wild to Tame (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Plexidemokinesis (Greek and Latin)
What on earth is a Plexidemokinesis? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.
Pyrostasis (Greek and Latin)
What on earth is a Pyrostasis? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles
Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Beta
Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Alpha
Can your students match multiple meanings of the same five words?
Cooking In Space
Watch astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti cook a meal in zero gravity on the International Space Station.
Bobbing for Apples
What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?
The Heaviest Pumpkin
How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?
Squiggles Collection 3
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
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?
Squiggles Collection 2
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
Create A Civ: Capital City
Every great capital is part geography, part human design. Research real ones, then build your own from scratch.
Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)
How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?
Word Pyramids
Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?
An Olympic Sized Pool and Jet Fuel (Episode 3)
How many times could you fill up a jet plane using the fuel that would fit in an olympic-sized pool?
An Olympic Sized Pool and 2 Liter Bottles (Episode 1)
How many 2 liter bottles could you fill up using the water in an olympic-sized pool?
Categorize and Re-Categorize Animals
Put these animals into groups. Then do it again. Then… do it one more time. How does re-re-grouping the same creatures reveal new patterns and give new insights?
Making Depth and Complexity Posters
Why buy premade posters when you can show off your students’ thinking about Depth and Complexity?
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Create A Civilization: Design A Flag
What makes for a good flag? What makes a bad flag?
Antonym Paths
Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?
Anti-Checkers
Sure, anyone can win at checkers… but can you lose!?
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?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Word Ladder: East to West (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
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?
Game: Wild Tic Tac Toe
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe, but both players can both play as both X and O throughout the whole game!
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!
Word Ladder: Arm to Leg (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Kid to Old (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Sky to Red (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder – Sun to Hot (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder – Tea to Hot (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Band to Sing (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Foot to Shoe (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Fire to Warm (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Measurement: An Elephant
What if I told you that an elephant weighed a back-breaking 176,000? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? But… how many corgis would that be?
Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?
So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?
Measurement: How Old Is Mr. Byrd?
What if I told you that I’m 341,640 old? Could you figure out what unit I’m using? Hint: it’s not years!
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.
Game: Snakes
In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?
Fixing Shakespearean Run-Ons
Can your students help The Bard? We’ll fix five Shakespearean run-ons in three different ways.
Writing Technique: 3 Dependent Clauses
A specific technique to help students add some spice to their writing. We’ll be writing sentences with three dependent clauses.
Math Game: Heaps
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
Game: Gomoku
Want to take Tic-Tac-Toe to the next level!? Imagine a 15×15 board. You must get five-in-a-row. You cannot get six-in-a-row. That’s Gomoku!
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
Writing A Thanksgiving Letter
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
Ambiguous Sentences
Rather than just demand that students “write clearly,” we’ll explore the hazards of poorly written sentences… and maybe create one of our own!
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.
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.
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.
Punctuation Power
In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!
Numerator or Denominator: Which has more power in a fraction?
What do you do with students who already get their fraction operations? Give them a contrived project about recipes or pizza slices? Make them solve annoyingly hard practice problems? Please. Here, we get students thinking in a whole new way, pondering which has more power, the numerator or denominator.
Depth and Complexity – An Introduction for Teachers
For TeachersDepth and Complexity is the most powerful framework most teachers have never heard of. Here’s what it actually is — and isn’t.
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: Fraction Equivalence
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: Times Equals Times
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
How Many Ways: 2 Digits ÷ 1 Digit = 1 Digit
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!
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?
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
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!
Complex or Compound – What’s In My Brain
Can your class spot the complex sentences vs compound sentences?
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.
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!
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!
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 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!?
Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy
Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?
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!
What Does it Cost to Fill a Car with Other Liquids
Is gas actually that expensive? What if we filled a car up with… orange juice?
Synonym Graphs
So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?
Math Curiosity: Odds & Squares
Why does the sum of the first 5 odds also equal 5 squared?
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
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.
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?
Climbing Bloom’s with Depth and Complexity
For TeachersBloom’s tells you how high to aim. Depth and Complexity tells you where to look. Combine them and things get interesting.
Percents and Credit Cards
Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!
Analyze Character Change with Depth and Complexity
Anyone can say a character changed. Your students will prove it: four details from the beginning, four from the end, and the two traits those details point to.
Create A Civilization Introduction
Your students build a civilization from scratch — rivers, flags, calendars, currency, government. Social studies, science, and writing woven into one year-long project.
A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions
Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
Create A Creature
Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
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.
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…
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.
New Uses for Everyday Things
For TeachersHere’s how Joelle Trayers gets even her youngest students ready to think in unexpected ways.
Multiple Perspectives in Primary
For TeachersEven our youngest students can learn to think from multiple perspectives!