Playlist: Bookmarks
Holiday Shuffle – Day vs Date
Wouldn’t some holidays be better on a certain day of the week? Should Thanksgiving have a set date?
Tournament of Mythological Creatures
Who will win the tournament of mythological creatures!?
Comparing Characters’ Bedrooms
What item’s in a character’s bedroom would reflect their deepest desires? And what if they toured a similar character’s room?
Emoji Stories 🐌
Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?
Factors and Codes: First Names (Episode 2)
Scrambled up somewhere in 161,000 is a first name. Can you find it!?
Factors and Codes (Episode 1)
Let’s use factors to encode and decode words.
Natural Disasters Tournament
Earthquake vs. hurricane. Tsunami vs. wildfire. Students set the criteria, argue their case, and crown a champion. Warning: it gets heated.
Comparing Fraction Strategies
For TeachersComparing fraction strategies? Let’s take it even further!
What’s the Pattern? Fraction Addition
Can your students figure out how to add fractions by looking for a pattern?
Five Sets of Bird and Bug Idioms
Five sets of idioms related to birds (and bugs).
Tournament of Ancient Inventions
Which of these inventions of the ancient world is most influential? Least useful today? Most taken-for-granted?
How Many Ways: Fraction Subtraction Equals 1/2
How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits zero through nine?
New Uses for a Paperclip
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
Looping Grid Art
Pick a few numbers, draw some corresponding lines on grid paper, and you’ll end up with some interesting, looping math-y art!
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?
An Escher-Style Tessellation Project
Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!
Not Like The Others: Natural Disasters
Four natural disasters. One doesn’t belong. But which one? That depends on your argument.
Writing A Thanksgiving Letter
What if an inanimate object could express thanks for a special person in your life? What would it write?
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?
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!
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!
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!
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.
Paragraphs: Systems of Sentences
Blow up a paragraph into individual sentences. Now reassemble it. The clues hiding in each sentence will surprise you.
What’s In My Brain: Cute Baby vs Fast Cheetah
Can students spot similes vs metaphors?
Fraction Ordering Tournament
Which set of fractions would be the trickiest to order from least to greatest? Let’s have a tournament!
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!
Sets of Idioms
Why do we say ‘break a leg’? Five themed sets of idioms your students will actually remember.
Investigating Christmas Trees
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
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!
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!
The Resiliency Tournament
Your students will set up a tournament to determine which person or character best demonstrated resiliency.
Synonym Graphs
So, which is happiest: happy, joyful, or ecstatic? Which is most temporary?
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.
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.
Educational Valentines
Let’s make valentines with an educational twist!
Greekymon
Rather than just memorizing word parts, students will use those word parts to create four possible products.
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!
Furnishing A Hotel
Design and furnish hotel rooms on a budget. Real math, real constraints, real decisions. Then pitch your hotel to investors.
Engineering: Build A Bridge
Using real bridges as their starting point, students will construct bridges out of straws and paperclips.