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Playlist: Bookmarks

Student Introductions With Depth, Complexity, and Frames: Level Two

Once students know the prompts of Depth and Complexity, let’s take them much higher up Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Coral Reef – Mixed Up Paragraph

Can you use the context clues to get these sentences about the coral reef back into the correct order?

Robot Writing: The Bridge

One painting of a bridge. Three robots. Who wrote it best?

Introducing Universal Theme of Conflict

So what could you do with a Universal Theme of Conflict? Well, here’s an introduction that will get your students’ brains sweating.

Greek and Latin Word Part Paths

How can we go from Biology to Immobile?

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?

Writing About Art: The Scream

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

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?

Writing Technique: Triple Anadiplosis!

Have students mastered the art of anadiplosis: ending one sentence with the beginning of the next? Now it’s time to take it to the next level!

Word Ladders Introduction

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

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.

Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences

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

Writing Sample: The Wind in the Willows

A passage from The Wind in the Willows to use as a mentor text, discussion starter, or writing prompt.

What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah

Can students spot similes vs metaphors?

Ghost

Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.

Upgrade Research Questions With Depth and Complexity

Ever ask students to create research questions? Were their ideas a bit… blah? My own students had a very hard time writing questions they didn’t already know the answer to! This video is how I solved that problem: upgrade research questions with depth and complexity.

Notice, Wonder: A Ship

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

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!

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.

Synonym Graphs

So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?

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.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

Climbing Bloom’s with Depth and Complexity

For Teachers

Bloom’s tells you how high to aim. Depth and Complexity tells you where to look. Combine them and things get interesting.

Depth and Complexity: 🏛️ Big Idea

Let’s get students thinking big and focusing on more abstract ideas.

Depth and Complexity: 👓 Multiple Perspectives

Every topic looks different depending on who’s looking. This prompt teaches students to see through someone else’s eyes.

Depth and Complexity: 🌻 Details

Get kids focusing on the small, but essential, details of a topic.

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.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

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

An App For A Historical Figure

What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?

Greekymon

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

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.

Greek and Latin Dinosaur Names

Let’s create a new dinosaur using Greek and Latin stems!

Multiple Perspectives in Primary

For Teachers

Even our youngest students can learn to think from multiple perspectives!