Playlist: Bookmarks
Idioms About Numbers 2
Five idioms related to numbers.
Idioms About Numbers 1
Five idioms related to numbers.
Idioms About Salt
Five idioms related to salt.
Idioms About Eggs
Five idioms related to eggs.
Idioms About Dessert
Five idioms related to dessert.
Idioms About Food 2
Five idioms related to food.
Idioms About Food 1
Five idioms related to food.
Idioms About Feet
Five idioms related to feet.
Idioms About Noses
Five idioms related to noses.
Idioms About Hands and Fingers
Five idioms related to hands and fingers.
Idioms About Hands
Five idioms related to hands.
Idioms About Body Parts
Five idioms related to body parts.
Idioms About Bugs
Five idioms related to bugs.
Idioms About Birds 2
Five idioms related to birds.
Idioms About Birds 1
Five idioms related to birds.
Idioms About Ducks
Five idioms related to ducks.
Idioms About Geese
Five idioms related to geese.
Idioms About Names
Five idioms related to names.
Idioms About Bites
Five idioms related to bites.
Idioms About the Greeks and Romans
Five idioms related to the Greeks and Romans.
Idioms About Mouths
Five idioms related to mouths.
Idioms About Water
Five idioms related to water.
Comparing Characters’ Bedrooms
What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?
Change A Story’s Genre
What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?
Holiday Emoji Story 🍪
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Emoji Stories 🚗
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Emoji Stories 🤖
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Greekymon Studies – Round 1
What might a creature named “Ursolunascope” be like?
A Character’s Playlist
What playlist of songs best goes with a character’s change over time?
Random Emoji Prompt Generator
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
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?
Holiday Writing: Packing Crates
An old photograph. A holiday scene. Pick one object in the picture and write from its point of view.
Special Gifts with Special Requirements
Your special friends sure have some unique gift needs!
Famous Structures
The Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the Sydney Opera House — group them, pick the best from each group, then design your own.
What’s In My Brain!? Gold vs Wood
Some of these examples are conductors and some are insulators!
Analyze Suffixes: -ly, -less, and -ful
What exactly does adding -less do to a word?
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?
The 8th Wonder of the World Tournament
Which of these eight wonders deserves to become the Eighth Wonder of the World!?
Greek and Latin Word Part Paths
How can we go from Biology to Immobile?
Tournament of Ancient Inventions
Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?
Antonym Paths
Does the antonym of an antonym bring us back to the same meaning?
Think Like A Historian
Here’s how effects be causes and causes can be effects!
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!
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?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?
So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?
Math Curiosity: Klauber’s Triangle
In 1932, a leading authority on rattlesnakes, Laurence Klauber, discovered a startling pattern within a triangle of primes.
Math Curiosity: Ulam Spiral
What if we make a huge spiral of numbers and then highlight only the primes? Well, a bunch of weird patterns show up!
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!
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.
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?
Change Leads to More Change
Can you think of a time in your life when “Change lead to more change?”
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.
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!
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.
Parentheses: How big of a change can they make!?
Two tiny parentheses. One expression. How big of a change can they make? Bigger than you think.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
Advanced Alliteration and Consonance
When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
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!?
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!
Paradox: Crocodile Dilemma
A crocodile makes a deal. But the deal creates a paradox. Can your students untangle a 2,000-year-old logic puzzle?
Paradox: The Liar’s Paradox
Nothing like a paradox to get your kids brains exploding 🤯! This one starts with five simple words: “This statement is a lie.”
Chomp
Chomp away at your opponent in this grid-based strategy game.
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!
Place Value (Beyond Base 10)
Place value is something we cover in elementary school. It seems simple, but I’d wager that very few adults really understand the topic. I sure didn’t until I worked with non-base-10 number systems in college. Your students can get a taste of this mind-boggling experience by imagining what it would be like if we didn’t have the number 9. What would each digit represent then?
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
More Specific than “Smart”
When students are told that they’re “smart”, what does this word actually mean to them? (Psst. It isn’t what we intended.)
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?
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.
Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction
Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.
Content Imperatives: Paradox
How can one idea pull in opposite directions, being both true and false or right and wrong at the same time? It’s time to explore Paradoxes!
Content Imperatives: Parallel
Get students thinking broadly by exploring similarities across multiple topics. Combine with Depth and Complexity for bonus points!
Running A Group Investigation Lesson
For TeachersLearn to lead a lesson that is built entirely on student curiosity.
Depth and Complexity: 👄 Language of the Discipline
Imagine a construction worker who doesn’t know the name of a screwdriver or a doctor who can’t remember what to call your neck. It’s pretty hard to communicate well without knowing the 👄 Language of the Discipline!
Depth and Complexity: ⏳ Change Over Time
Want to get students thinking about how a topic has changed or might change in the future? The ⏳ Change Over Time thinking tool is just what you need!
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.
Fraction Puzzlers: Add and Subtract Fractions To Reach A Number
You only have six digits to form three fractions. Can you combine them to get to 0?
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.
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.
Literary Technique: Juxtaposition
Put a grumpy character next to a joyful one and they make each other stand out even more. Opposites are powerful!
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.
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.
Common English Words From Other Languages
Bored with typical spelling studies? Let’s dig into the origins of common English words from other languages!
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!
Ethics In The Young Elementary Classroom
For TeachersCan kindergartners discuss ethical issues? Yes. Here’s how to weave multiple-perspective problems throughout your curriculum.