Cross Curricular

Start A Lesson With A Music Video

I love collecting intriguing images and videos – things that stop me in my tracks and pique my curiosity. I always figure that if it fascinates me, students would probably be interested also. Often, these visuals work as wonderful hooks for a lesson you need to teach.

First Levels: Sentence Starters

As silly as it may sound, providing sentence stems or "fill in the blanks" can give your kids the scaffold they need to achieve a higher level of success.

Create A Holiday

Take students beyond the decorations and ask them to identify what a holiday reveals about a culture's values. Then, push them further as they develop their own holidays.

Beware “Real World Problems”

Why I stopped looking for “real world” problems and started aiming for “interesting.” The real world is often tedious and annoying. Interesting never is!

Classic Paintings for your Classroom

Exposing students to great pieces of art is an easy way to enhance a lesson, provide a visual way to practice a skill, and educate our students beyond the prescribed curriculum. Here's a list of works that you can easily grab and use in your class.

Don’t Jump Straight to “Create”!

When we jump from "this kid likes board games" straight to "I'll have them create a new board game", we leave out important steps in the creative process and set kids up for disappointment (and end up with a lot of unfinished projects). Here's how to scaffold a truly creative task.

Fluency: Asking For (Way) More Than One Answer

Being able to generate many possible answers is key to high-level thinking. So why don't we ask students to do it more often?

Curiosity Skill: Encouraging Students to Ask Other Students

If you want to make a massive change in the culture of your classroom, move from teachers asking students all of the questions to students asking each other questions!

Synthesize: Make A Change, Explain The Effect

I love the term "Synthesize" from the classic Bloom's Taxonomy, but it can be hard to know exactly what it looks like. My favorite "Synthesize Recipe" is to ask students to make a change to existing content and then explain the effects of that change to me.

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