Playlist: Bookmarks
Words Within Words: Chocolate
How many words can you find within Chocolate?
St. Patrick and Other Legends
How would real people feel about the legends that have been created about them?
Words Within Words: PATRICK
How many words can you find within Patrick?
Words Within Words: RAINBOW
How many words can you find within rainbow?
Words Within Words: IRELAND
How many words can you find within Ireland?
Getting Specific With St. Patrick’s Day Writing
Let’s take a starting phrase about St. Patrick’s Day and get specific. No, even more specific!
Tournament of Mythological Creatures
Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?
New Uses For A Cardboard Tube
So, what can a cardboard tube be used for other than holding wrapping paper?
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.
Mother’s Day Cards
Let’s write the cleverest Mother’s Day cards you’ve ever seen!
Letters With Symmetry
Let’s group letters by their symmetry, then create symmetrical words, and then symmetrical sentences!
Domesticated Animals Tournament
Which domesticated animal will win the tournament?
Math Curiosity: Magic Triangles
Can you make each side of this triangle add up to 9 using the digits 1-6?
Parts of Speech Party: Introduction (Check)
How many ways can we use “check” in a paragraph? And can your students spot when it’s a verb, or a noun, or an adjective?
A Halloween Costume Gone Wrong
Let’s go roller skating in a Halloween costume! What could possibly go wrong?
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)
How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?
Think Like An Author: Hemingway vs Dickens
What if your students rewrote Dickens in the style of Hemingway and vice versa?
Word Pyramids
Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?
Geometry Image: Esplanade Theaters
What odd and interesting shapes can your students find in this geometric image?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Mary Had A Little Lamb”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
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?
Thanksgiving Photo Writing
Starting with an old-timey photo, students will write from a particular item’s point of view.
Word Pyramid: T to Patch
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Precipitation Tournament
Eight types of precipitation battle it out in this tournament.
Parts of Speech Tournament
Which part of speech is most useful? Interesting? Strange?
Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests
For TeachersHere 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?
Create A Civilization: Design A Flag
What makes for a good flag? What makes a bad flag?
Why “Challenging” May Not Be The Right Goal
For TeachersSo many of us say, “I want to challenge my students!” But, would you want a job that you describe as “challenging”?
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
How Many Will There Be? Pyramids
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
Writing A Thanksgiving Letter
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
Remixing A Holiday Poem
Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!
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?
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.
Writing Seuss Style Poetry
Sure, Dr. Seuss wrote for young students, but can older students analyze his writing and learn to mimic his style? THEN, they can produce Seuss-style poetry about any topic: Ancient China, the electromagnetic spectrum, Pride and Prejudice, and (yes) fraction division!
What’s In My Brain: May vs May
The word “may” can be used for possibility or permission. It’s a modal auxiliary verb!
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Run On or Not? – What’s In My Brain
Can your students spot the run-on sentences?
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!
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!
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?
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.
Describing Author’s Voice
What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
Fractals: Sierpinski’s Triangle
What if this triangle pattern just kept repeating… forever!?
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
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.
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.
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.