“I use Byrdseed TV to differentiate for my clustered students. I LOVE all the ideas!” ~ a teacher in Washington
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.
Who can get to 100 first in this simple, but delightful, math game?
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?
So what are some new ways to use a paperclip?
A worksheet pack featuring writing prompts, a summer essay project, a science-based escape room activity, and image analysis prompts.
A mosaic technique that makes watercolor approachable. Students walk away with something they’re proud of.
What if we played chess on a board that’s only 4×5?
So, what can a chair be used for other than, you know, sitting in?
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
The barber shaves everybody who doesn’t themselves. So… does the barber shave himself?
Everyone starts with the same squiggle. No two drawings end up the same. What do you see?
What if you had really weak chess pieces, but you could always move twice?
A music video filmed on 64 phones and then displayed on 64 phones. What?
What if you only played Tic-Tac-Toe with Xs and you could play on multiple boards?
You won’t believe how fascinating it is to watch a map of the most popular baby names by US state.
These two tables are the same size. But how!?
What are these two women up to? What’s that thing she’s holding? Let’s make some inferences!
What if one player had, say, 32 pawns?
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with a love potion on the loose!
What’s going on in this room? There are shoes everywhere! Are those… oranges? Let’s make some inferences!
An animated summary of Shakespeare’s utterly ridiculous “Twelfth Night.”
Why does this dinosaur keep looking at me…
Create mathematical art with curves that, well, aren’t curvy.
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Romeo and Juliet in just about five minutes.
Start with facts about Christmas trees. Group them. Label them. Can you boil it all down to one big idea?
Let’s get students’ art really popping with two-point perspective!
Sure, anyone can win at checkers… but can you lose!?
This optical illusion looks like a 3D staircase, but it’s all drawn on a plain piece of paper.
Ready to learn a 2,500-year-old Chinese board game? Let’s… Go!
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
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.
What would the consequences be if no one had to sleep anymore?
Watch this block of Lego cast three completely different shadows of three distinctly different objects! How’d he do it?
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
Who will win the tournament of Van Gogh self-portraits!?
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Tired of boring ol’ chess? Then you need to try FOUR PLAYER chess!
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?
Shaolin kung fu students as seen from a satellite.
