Playlist: Bookmarks
Random Emoji Prompt Generator
Click up an interesting, visual writing prompt suitable for any grade or purpose.
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Back to School: Rewriting The Beatles’ “Help!”
Can your students come up with a one-syllable word to sum up their time away from school? And then rewrite The Beatles’ song Help!?
Analyze Suffixes: -ly, -less, and -ful
What exactly does adding -less do to a word?
Writing in Pilish
Pi can go beyond circles! What if you wrote using the digits of pi as your guide?
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?
Inferring With Art: Two Women
What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!
Game: Wild Tic Tac Toe
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe, but both players can both play as both X and O throughout the whole game!
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!
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!
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?
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.
Punctuation Power
In a sentence, punctuation may seem meek when compared to those mighty words, but punctuation has incredible power over the meaning of a sentence. Students will try re-punctuating sentences to find new meanings – without changing a single word!
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!
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
How Many Ways: Fraction Equivalence
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
Writing A Story About Fraction Equivalence
When fractions take on a new denominator, it’s as if they’re wearing a disguise – same value, new look. So let’s write a story about fraction equivalence starring a fraction who needs to fit in with a new group.
Run On or Not? – What’s In My Brain
Can your students spot the run-on sentences?
Calculators, Patterns, and Multiplying By Decimals
Before teaching students the procedure for multiplying with decimals, how much can they intuitively glean from a structured play session with calculators?
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?
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.
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!
Describing Author’s Voice
What if… Edgar Allen Poe wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
Fractals: Koch Snowflake
You could keep zooming in on this snowflake forever!
Propaganda and Logical Fallacies
Let’s see how propaganda techniques can make even something great seem bad.
Math Curiosity: Primes and Squares
Can any perfect square be written as the sum of two primes?
Math Curiosity: Twin Primes
What do you call two prime numbers who are very close together?
Academic Love Letters
What if Kylo Ren wrote a love letter to Abe Lincoln or the Sahara Desert wrote one to the Moon?
Percents and Credit Cards
Let’s buy something expensive with a credit card and then make only the minumum payments!
Exploring Circumference With Famous Circles
Let’s find how the diameter and circumference of famous circles are related.
“Its Big Day” – A Children’s Story About Its and It’s
Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.
Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture
Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
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.
Writing Clear Directions
Can you write directions so clear that a group of kids can put a toy together with no illustrations?
Math Project: What If I Bought Apple Stock Instead?
What if you had an original iPod and sold it compared to if you had bought the equivalent amount of Apple stock and sold that?