Playlist: Bookmarks
Hero or Not A Hero?
Students will determine what makes a hero a hero.
Change A Story’s Genre
What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?
Aquamorphotron (Greek and Latin)
What on earth is a Aquamorphotron? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.
Greekymon Studies – Round 1
What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?
Crossing Every Bridge Exactly Once (aka Eulerian Paths)
How can you cross each bridge in this city exactly once?
Robot Writing: Volcano
Read three pieces of writing from three different robots about the same beautiful painting of a volcano. Who wrote it best?
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.
Chess Variant: Monster Chess
What if you had really weak chess pieces, but you could always move twice?
Microchess (Chess Variant)
What if we played chess on a board that’s only 4×5?
Charge of the Light Brigade – Chess Variant
What if one side played with THREE QUEENS and the other had SEVEN KNIGHTS!? What if?
Horde Chess Variant
What if one player had, say, 32 pawns?
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!
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.
How Many Will There Be? Desks
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Measurement: A Long Movie
What if I told you a movie was a whopping 0.017 long? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? This lesson packs in strange measurements of time as well as tiny decimals.
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.
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!
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!
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
Do Narrators Have Too Much Power?
Imagine being a character in a story. Are you worried that your story’s narrator may inaccurately describe you? What if they reveal something you wanted to be kept secret? Do narrators have too much power!?
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!
Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals
Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?
Sprouts
Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.
Why Is Our Calendar So Weird!?
Why are there 12 months? Why don’t weeks fit into months evenly? Why don’t weeks fit into the year evenly? What’s going on with the calendar!
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.
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction
Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.
What Do Mean and Median Mean?
When will mean and median give us different results?
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Percents and Credit Cards
Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!
Discovering Pi With Sticky Notes
Pi is mysterious and strange! Why not let students discover it on their own?
Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles
Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
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!
Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs
Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.
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.
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.
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.