Enrichment is not merely about doing fun things. It should never be just a project-of-the-week. It must be about getting students thinking in new and interesting ways. Here's how!
Game: Ghost
How to play the word-building game Ghost.
Enrichment should be much more than fun and games. It shouldn't be a bunch of random projects and activities. The goal of enrichment is to get kids analyzing, evaluating, and synthesizing. Here's a few resources for doing just that.
Enrichment is not merely about doing fun things. It should never be just a project-of-the-week. It must be about getting students thinking in new and interesting ways. Here's how!
How to play the word-building game Ghost.
Let’s create an MC Escher-style tessellation art (and math) project with nothing more than an index card, a marker, and paper.
Let’s play Tic-Tac-Toe with numbers. But instead of three-in-a-row, we’re summing to 15.
Imagine Tic-Tac-Toe if both players could play as both Xs and Os!
Let’s play the simple (but surprisingly strategic) game of Chomp!
With Sprouts, students draw a small set of dots and then connect those dots with lines. The first person who can’t make a connection loses.
A surprisingly strategic game played on a simple grid.
Heaps is a lovely math-y strategy game that requires no more than paper and pencil to play.
When you’re teaching a reading skill, can you replace some of those dull sample texts with glorious artwork?
According to Costello, 7 × 13 = 28. In fact, watch him prove it…
Sure, tic tac toe is too boring for most people. But oh golly are there some fun variations!
My 21st century 12-year-olds absolutely died watching Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s On First” skit. And we got a great homophone activity out of it too.
Students took the classic song, Help!, and rewrote it to be about their collective summers.
An easy way to spice up any lesson is to remove the god-awful samples and replace them with selections from great works of art, music, film, tv shows, and historic moments. You get the added bonus of exposing students to new ideas.
Here’s a quick to learn but difficult to master math game. Start with some basic divisibility rules, but then feel free to extend it to any math topic.
How few colors can you use to fill in a map so that no neighboring regions are the same color?
Here’s how playing simple, paper-and-pencil games can go beyond fun and also serve as practice for higher-level, abstract thinking.
Here’s a fun thought experiment your students are sure to get a kick out of: when something is slowly replaced over time, is it still the same thing in the end?
A fun, abstract vocab puzzle in which students can add one letter per line, forming a pyramid of words.
Many readers sent in recommendations for sci-fi and fantasy stories for gifted readers. I’ve gathered these together here as a growing collection.
I love videos of robots messing up tasks. This one in particular struck a chord, because we get to see the robot learn from his mistakes. Let’s have students write him some advice…
Students learn about prime numbers early in their careers, but the true, quirky nature of these numbers isn’t really explored unless kids go on to become math majors. Here are three fun prime explorations suitable for even young students.
Begin with a small, simple word and identify its antonym. Then, take this second word and find its antonym. Many times, you’ll find that an antonym of an antonym isn’t always related the original word.
Wanted to share another cheap, quick, and simple game that has interesting complexities and connections to math. This game is called Domineering. All you need are paper and a pencil. Graph paper would be a luxury.
Paradoxes and illusions are a great area of study to blow students’ minds. I recently discovered an amazing artist, Kokichi Sugihara, who creates and films optical illusions using just paper and balls.