Playlist: Bookmarks
Hero or Not A Hero?
Students will determine what makes a hero a hero.
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.
How to Reset Your Brain When You’re Flooded
Allison Edwards explains how changing your senses can reset your brain.
What Happens In Your Brain When You’re Worried or Afraid
Allison Edwards explains how blood flow in your brain affects your decision-making
Holiday Writing: Packing Crates
An old photograph. A holiday scene. Pick one object in the picture and write from its point of view.
What’s In My Brain!? Japan vs Jamaica
Is it an island or an archipelago?
Writing About Art: Impression, Sunrise
Look closely at Impression, Sunrise. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Plant Adaptation Tournament
Who will win in a tournament of eight plants with Interesting adaptations!?
Exploration Technology Tournament
Which of these pieces of exploration technology is most important? Most underrated? Most long-lasting?
Parts of Speech Tournament
Which part of speech is most useful? Interesting? Strange?
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
Writing About Art: Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
Look closely at Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. What do you notice? Now turn those details into a poem you didn’t know you could write.
Writing About Art: The Scream
Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Math Game: Heaps
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) subtraction game!
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!
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
Remixing A Holiday Poem
Let’s take a classic Christmas poem and remix it to work with another holiday!
What If There Were No Hundreds Place?
Imagine a world with no hundreds place. We’d have to call it ten tens instead. But then, what would we call the thousands place? How would we read 9999? What if we added one more?
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
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: 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?
Grouping Quadrilaterals In A Hierarchy
Can we classify quadrilaterals like we classify living things?
Analyzing Movies’ Success
So should we make another movie in this series?
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.
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!
Doubling Dollars
Say you have a dollar. Say you can double that dollar each day: $1, $2, $4, and so on. How long will it take to reach… one million dollars? Not as long as you might think!
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.
Propaganda and Logical Fallacies
Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.
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: Contribuition
Pull on one thread and watch the whole topic move. Contribution asks: what single factor is quietly shaping everything else?
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!
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.
Elements of The Fantasy Genre
Every fantasy story has patterns hiding underneath the magic. Once your students see the elements, they’ll spot them everywhere — and use them in their own writing.
An App For A Historical Figure
What kind of an app could have helped Abe Lincoln accomplish his goals?
Reduce Anxiety: Square Breathing (Tool 1)
Reduce anxiety by breathing in a square pattern.
Creating A Classroom Motto
Starting with specific examples of fantastic classroom behavior, your class will end up with one sentence summing up their expectations. It’s a classroom motto!