Playlist: Bookmarks
Prefixes and Suffixes in Other Languages
Let’s go beyond merely memorizing word parts and instead analyze across languages. How do other languages make a word the opposite?
Building “Not Like The Others” Tasks
For TeachersA delightfully ambiguous framework that is quick to prepare, but can last forever!
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?
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
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!
Pronouns With Too Many Antecedents
What happens when a pronoun could refer to more than one noun? Big problems!
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: Collatz Conjecture
The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…
Intellectual Intensity
Do you know someone who becomes a bit overexcited by ideas?
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.
Better Stories Part 4: Character Archetypes
Are students’ characters a bit flat? Archetypes give them a strong foundation on which to build their own characters as well as a tool to analyze existing stories.