← Back to all of your playlists

Playlist: Bookmarks

When to Go Deeper? When to Just Move On?

For Teachers

When should teachers take the time to build an advanced version of something? And when should they just let students move along?

Halloween Emoji Story 🎃

Five emoji. One story. Where will your imagination take you?

Bobbing for Apples

What is bobbing for apples like… for an apple?

The Heaviest Pumpkin

How heavy is the world’s heaviest pumpkin when measured in Mr. Byrds?

Squiggles Introduction

What do you see in this squiggle?

Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)

Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!

Graphic Organizers and Higher Order Thinking

For Teachers

A few quick tips on how to better use graphic organizers to support higher-order thinking.

Differentiate with Low Floors and High Ceilings

For Teachers

Stop starting at grade level and stretching up. Start high and scaffold down. It’s simpler, and it actually works.

Fizz Buzz: A Counting and Divisibility Game

Ready for a tricky counting and divisibility game?

Notice, Wonder: Swirls

A mysterious image. Reveal it slowly. Let your students wonder!

How Many Ways: Divide Fractions Equal 1/4

How many different ways can you make this fraction division math statement true using only the digits one through nine?

Brain Needs or Heart Needs

For Teachers

We think of gifted kids as only having academic needs, but – in their own words – they also have many needs of the heart.

Not Like The Others: Branches of the US Government

How is each part of the United States Government not like the other parts?

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!

Addressing Disorganization

For Teachers

Know any kids who, despite their brilliant minds, have a bit of a hard time keeping things in order, turning things in on time, or remembering to put their names on their papers?

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?

Writing About Art: The Scream

Your students will turn the iconic painting The Scream into a vivid, sensory poem.

How Many Will There Be? Desks

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Difficult vs Complex Tasks

For Teachers

What separates difficulty from complexity? And why do complex tasks lead to much more natural differentiation?

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?

Creating Sequences of Questions

For Teachers

High-level questions on their own simply aren’t enough. We must create sequences of questions!

Complex Task: Academic Tournaments

For Teachers

Who would win in the Tournament of Least Useful Geometric Shapes or Bravest Shakespearean Characters? Create an academic tournament and watch your students’ brains sweat!

Developing Questions that Prompt Thinking in Math

For Teachers

Math is a particularly tricky subject for asking higher-level questions. Here are a couple of techniques I’ve used to prompt students to think, not merely calculate.

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!

An Escher-Style Tessellation Project

Create a piece of repeating art in the style of MC Escher!

Game: Snakes

In this grid-based strategy game, who will be the last to add to the snake?

Jotto

Who can guess the codeword first?

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!

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.

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!

Running A “Notice, Wonder” Lesson

For Teachers

Use these puzzling images to build a classroom culture that is comfortable with curiosity, ambiguity, and taking intellectual risks.

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!

How Renewable Is That Resource?

Which resource is more renewable? And which is easier to find?

Asking Questions That Make Students Think

For Teachers

Most classroom questions test memory. These questions test thinking. There’s a difference — and your students will feel it.

How Many Ways: Times Equals Minus

How many different ways can you make this math statement true using only the digits one through nine?

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?

Same Perimeter, Different Area For Rectangles

Can two rectangles have the same perimeter but… different areas!?

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?

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?

Game: Notakto

What if you only played Tic-Tac-Toe with Xs and you could play on multiple boards?

Sprouts

Learn how to play the abstract, paper-and-pencil game Sprouts.

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.

Create A Creature

Create a new creature based on the adaptations of existing creatures from the same biome.

Math Curiosity: Palindromic Number Conjecture

Using this one weird trick, it seems that you can turn any number into a palindrome!

The Game of 100

Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?

New Uses for Everyday Things

For Teachers

Here’s how Joelle Trayers gets even her youngest students ready to think in unexpected ways.

Response to Lit: An Inductive Approach

For Teachers

Here’s how one teacher uses inductive thinking to help students respond to literature.