Playlist: Bookmarks
Characters’ Faults Can Also Be Strengths
Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.
Natural Disasters Tournament
Earthquake vs. hurricane. Tsunami vs. wildfire. Students set the criteria, argue their case, and crown a champion. Warning: it gets heated.
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Squiggles Introduction
What do you see in this squiggle?
What If… Unreliable Water?
What would the consequences be if a town’s tap water became… unreliable?
What If… Long Life?
What would the consequences be if all people lived much, much longer?
What If… No Sleep?
What would the consequences be if no one had to sleep anymore?
New Uses For A Chair
So, what can a chair be used for other than, you know, sitting in?
New Uses For A Pencil
So, what can a pencil be used for other than writing and drawing?
New Uses For An Aluminum Can
So, what CAN a CAN be used for other than storing liquids?
Zig Zag Cipher (Codes Part 3)
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Categorize and Re-Categorize Countries
Put these countries into groups. Then do it again. Then… do it one more time. How does re-re-grouping the same places reveal new patterns and give new insights?
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?
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
Concept Attainment: Art
Can your students tell the difference between cubism and abstract art?
Paradox: Rebuilding A Ship
What if we completely rebuild something slowly? What if we completely rebuild it all at once? Is it still the same thing?
Fractions: Decompose and Recompose
What if we took a fraction apart, then took those pieces apart, then recombined them, and then recombined those, arriving back to the original fraction?
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!
Self Portraits: Text Art
What if a students’ self-portrait was made of words that describe the student!?
Self Portraits Part One: Line Drawings
Anyone, yes anyone, can create a (somewhat) realistic self-portrait using these steps. Anyone!
Measurement: An Elephant
What if I told you that an elephant weighed a back-breaking 176,000? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? But… how many corgis would that be?
Measurement: A Long Movie
What if I told you a movie was a whopping 0.017 long? Could you figure out the unit I’m using? This lesson packs in strange measurements of time as well as tiny decimals.
Measurement: How Big is this Bathtub?
So, if I told you a bathtub holds 640 of water, which unit would make the most sense?
Measurement: How Old Is Mr. Byrd?
What if I told you that I’m 341,640 old? Could you figure out what unit I’m using? Hint: it’s not years!
Addition: 3 Digits Plus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit addition.
Subtraction: 3 Digits Minus 2 Digits (Multiple Solutions)
Typical practice problems don’t move students up Bloom’s Taxonomy. With this framework, you’ll see kids stop and really think about how to approach multi-digit subtraction.
Math Curiosity: A Pattern Packed Triangle
Pascal’s pattern-packed triangle is a potent puzzle for pupils to ponder.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
The Personalities of Rocks
What would an igneous rock be like? Would it get along with a sedimentary rock? Could they handle the hot personality of a metamorphic rock?
Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles
Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?
Undoing Multiplication With Division
Multiplication and division, natural foes, are constantly seeking to undo each other. Students will attempt to reverse the effects of multiplication by dividing once, twice, or even thrice!
Paradox: The Barber’s Paradox
The barber shaves everybody who doesn’t themselves. So… does the barber shave himself?
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!
Rounding Numbers (But Not To 10)
What could we possibly do to make rounding more interesting for students who already get it? In this series, students consider how they might round to values other than “the nearest 10.” How, for example, do we round to the nearest 9? 7? 15?
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.”
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!
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?
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!
Investigating Cost of Living
Would you save money if you lived in Las Vegas and commuted every day to San Francisco?
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!
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!
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.
Persuasion and Packaging: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos
How does a drink’s packaging affect us emotionally and logically?
Visualizing Fraction Multiplication
What does it look like to multiply fractions?
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
Your students will use Depth and Complexity to note how a character’s main trait changes across a story.
A Visual Guide To Dividing By Fractions
Have you ever wondered what it looks like to divide by a fraction, man?
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
Ways to Start a Sentence – Level 1
‘Add more variety!’ teachers say. But how? This lesson gives students actual techniques instead of vague advice.
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
Writing Summaries in Haiku
Let’s write a summary. A very short summary. With VERY strict rules.
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.