Finding the Fun in “It’s” vs “Its” How do we differentiate a dull lesson like "its" vs "it's"? I decided to push it to an extreme (and include some unexpected novelty).
Puzzle: Words Within Words In need of some nice word puzzles that will keep your students busy? Ask them to find as many words as they can within another word. For example: can you find 10 words made from the letters in "soldier"? How about 20? 50?
Exploring Palindromes in ELA and Math Palindromes are one of those fun ideas that some gifted kids just latch onto. We'll check out palindromic words, phrases, and even numbers in this article.
A Remix Library A list of stories inspired by older stories to teach your students about the history of reusing ideas.
Compare and Contrast Movie Trailers Over Time Here's a movie made in 1977, and its trailer is barely watchable! In fact, it almost made me not want to watch Star Wars, a movie I know almost by heart. Perhaps we're onto something interesting for our students to analyze.
Matilda – Book Study Ideas Roald Dahl's Matilda, a childhood favorite of mine, opens up some fantastic discussions about adults, being brave, and how power can be used and abused.
Is Your Writing Process This Fun? Teaching our students to prewrite, write, and rewrite is a difficult process. Much like getting students to show their work in math, process writing is a challenge for gifted students who work intuitively and are annoyed by artificial processes. What better motivation is there than the chance to point out someone else's errors AND be rewarded for it?
A Wrinkle In Time – Novel Study Ideas Madeleine L'Engle’s 1962 science-fiction classic, A Wrinkle in Time makes for a fantastic classroom novel study.
The Tragedy of the Commons Imagine that we all share a common resource, but no one is really in charge. How do we maintain order without an authority? This is a fantastically fuzzy situation for students to dig into.
Classic Halloween Stories With Halloween approaching, it's a great time to expose students to some spooky classics. Lucky for us, many of these stories are in the public domain and freely available in many formats.
