Sometimes we can learn a lot by doing something the wrong way. Here are six ways your students can purposefully design awful, misleading graphs.
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Creating Seemingly Unrelated Analogies
Want to encourage students to find unexpected connections across content? Here’s a quick framework based on the most important terms from both bits of content.
Creating A New Mathematical Operation
Do your students realize that addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are all examples of the same idea: an operation? And that it’s quite possible to create a brand new operation? Let’s do it!
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).
Creating A New Creature
We’re not doing a fluffy art project here. Kids are developing a realistic, made up creature that could have actually lived in a particular biome.
The Surprises Within a Triangle’s Angles
Discovering what is interesting and unexpected about a triangle’s angles. What twists have I unintentionally spoiled for my students over the years?
Make A *Better* Calendar!
The calendar is a source of fantastic factoring problems with many social studies add-ons. Why 12 months? Why 30 (or 31 or 28) days? Why are weeks 7 days long? Why don’t they fit into the months (or the year!)? Why did we do this to ourselves!?
Don’t Just “Have A Discussion”
Why I now strike the phrase “have a discussion” from my lesson plans.
Running A Curiosity Project
Merlin Mann stated that employees’ motivation increases when they get to “build a robot” once in a while. That is, do something creative beyond regular work. Can we do this at school? Offices have “casual Fridays,” can we have “curiosity Fridays?”
Depth and Complexity: ❓Unanswered Questions
By far, ❓Unanswered Questions was the prompt that I under-utilized with my own class. Now I see it in a whole new light, and boy is there immense power in prompting students to note and explore truly unanswered questions.