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Playlist: Bookmarks

Famous Structures

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

The 8th Wonder of the World Tournament

Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?

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?

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?

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.

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!

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.

Disneyland Parking Structure Math Project

Your students will use estimation strategies to figure out how many parking spots are there in the parking structure at Disneyland? And you bet I reveal the real answer!

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.

Fraction Ordering Tournament

Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!

Intersecting Angles and Streets

There can never be just one angle.

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: 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?

The Resiliency Tournament

Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.

Upgrading Compare and Contrast Writing

Upgrade compare and contrast writing with just a couple of key words.

Analyzing Movies’ Success

So should we make another movie in this series?

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.

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.

Improving Presentations 1: Watching The Greats

Get better at giving presentations by studying the greats!

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.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

Create A Creature

Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.

Greekymon

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

Response to Lit: An Inductive Approach

For Teachers

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

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.

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.