Playlist: Bookmarks
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.
Building Creative Confidence with the Torrance Tests
For TeachersHere are a bunch of ways to quickly practice creativity with your students for zero dollars.
Anti-Checkers
Sure, anyone can win at checkers… but can you lose!?
Ultimate (or Inception) Tic Tac Toe
What if each square on a Tic-Tac-Toe board had another Tic-Tac-Toe board inside of it?
A Lunar Survival Mission
A favorite of mine! This task is delightfully complex and ambiguous, forcing students to make choices without enough information and with no right answer. How will they survive on the moon for three days?
Game: Number Scrabble
What if we played Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers and instead of three-in-a-row, we add up to 15? Well… then we’d have Number Scrabble!
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
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?
Not Like The Others: Creatures of the Tundra
Four tundra creatures. 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!
Game: Order and Chaos
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
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!
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
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.
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.
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.
Math Curiosity: Finding Primes
Prime numbers are unpredictable! How can we possibly find them all? An Ancient Greek mathematician found one way!
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
An App For A Historical Figure
What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?
Math Curiosity: Collatz Conjecture
The Collatz Conjecture: start with any number and get to 1 using just two rules. It seems to always work…
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
Writing Clear Directions
Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?
New Uses for Everyday Things
For TeachersHere’s how Joelle Trayers gets even her youngest students ready to think in unexpected ways.
Impostor Syndrome
For TeachersThe student who breezes through school may hit a wall in college. Here’s why — and what to do about it now.