These puzzles are all FREE. If you enjoy sharing them with your students, you can find more novel puzzles AND tutorials HERE. After sharing about Snowflake Sudoku, I began creating similar Sudoku puzzles made with hexagonal shapes. I’ve started calling them Hex-Doku puzzles and this will serve as a landing page with a list of … Read more
This is an activity you can do with students before they read or listen to a challenging chapter, poem, or text. If you know they will encounter some advanced words, this is an engaging and maybe a bit sneaky way to introduce the vocabulary. I call it “Playful Predictions” and it combines a fun prediction … Read more
Your students are being called “the Artemis generation.” The plans for NASA’s Artemis missions don’t include going to “infinity,” but they are bold and exciting and set the stage for missions to Mars. I’ve spent some time viewing videos and exploring NASA’s educational resources, and used a little of everything to create what I hope … Read more
The two stories below are meant to serve as an inspiration to us all. I hope to highlight more of these positive stories in future posts. If you have a story to share about how your students have impacted their community or school, please consider leaving a comment below so we can celebrate it with … Read more
A MIND-STRETCHING SET OF CHALLENGES THAT REQUIRES ZERO PREP! How many tasks can be inspired by a simple two-digit number? When I began playing around with this idea, my brain exploded. This is just the kind of task we want for our students, right? mind-blowing and brain-stretching? And the best part? The challenge sets below … Read more
I considered it a compliment when a colleague said to me, “You not only seek out professional development, you always take something you learn, even if it’s only one small thing, and try to incorporate it somehow into what you are already doing with your students.” I guess I’m what you call an “action researcher”- … Read more
A funny thing happened when I was creating a new resource for you. About a year ago, I began working on an idea for vocabulary enrichment that would “sneak” advanced vocabulary into activities students enjoy. I know many students love hidden words, wordplay, and puzzles. I thought it might be fun to create a resource … Read more
I’m a huge fan of Nathan Pyle’s Strange Planet comic series. I see so much potential for its use in the classroom that I had to devote an entire post to it! Who hasn’t pondered the idea of how strange and silly some of our customs and earthly activities would look to extraterrestrial aliens? The … Read more
In The Math Behind the Fun and Games ~ Lessons for Masterminds Who Love Wordle, the focus was on introducing students to combinatorics, the branch of math that is behind many popular daily puzzles. Here I’ll share three different ways to present daily math puzzles so that younger students can join in and older students … Read more
The nine weeks or so between spring break and the end of the year can sail by really fast. A legacy project is one way to inspire students in the final months of school. It can take many forms and be presented at any grade level. Maybe these ideas will inspire you in the last … Read more
