Question Renovations

I remade my old, weak questions into versions with high ceilings and low floors.

Jabberwocky and Context Clues

Context clues lessons can be a disaster. Here, we expose students to a delightful classic packed with nonsense words (“Jabberwocky”) and ask them to decipher the meanings and parts of speech. Then, it’s only natural for students to write their own nonsense poems.

Multiple Meaning Matcher – Introduction

Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.

How Many Will There Be? Chip Off The Block

Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.

Analyze and Create Misleading Graphs

Let’s make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.

Two Animals Switch Biomes

What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?

Fancier Figurative Language: Start with a Cliche

We’ll start with the cliché “as cold as ice” and go somewhere much more interesting.

The Pros and Cons of Producers and Consumers

Sure, students might know the difference between a producer and a consumer… but have they considered how they feel about each other? What, in a producer’s opinion, are the pros and cons of a consumer?

Changing Coordinating Conjunctions

What happens when we switch out a “but” with a “so”? An “and” with a “for”? How can such tiny words make such big differences?

Characters’ Faults Can Also Be Strengths

Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character’s flaw can be a benefit.

Stories with the Same Problems and Solutions

Have you ever noticed that some stories have awfully similar problems? What if we looked for the most unusual way of solving a repeating problem?

A Character’s Playlist

What playlist of songs best goes with a character’s change over time?

Lines, Line Segments, Rays, and Infinity!

A lesson about lines, line segments, and rays that avoids dull memorization. Instead, we ponder this delightful question: Which is longer, a ray or a line? Then, kids consider what these different geometric concepts would think about each other.

Change A Story’s Genre

What if we rewrote a story’s climax into a totally different genre?

A System Similar to a Cell

Which parts of a cell serve a similar job to the parts of a cruise ship, human body, computer, or other system?

That Quote’s Not Quite Right: Albert Einstein

When I see a quote, I often think, “That’s not quite right!”