Question Renovations
I remade my old, weak questions into versions with high ceilings and low floors.
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.
Your students will try to match up definitions that belong to the same homophone in this brain-boggling vocab puzzle.
We'll start with the cliché "as cold as ice" and go somewhere much more interesting.
Let's make some intentionally bad graphs to learn how to spot poorly made graphs.
Give kids a taste of a sequence, let them build an understanding, and then see how far their predictions can take them.
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?
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?
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 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.
What if we rewrote a story's climax into a totally different genre?
Which parts of a cell serve a similar job to the parts of a cruise ship, human body, computer, or other system?
What playlist of songs best goes with a character's change over time?
What if a capybara and a kangaroo rat switched homes? Would their adaptations be helpful at all?
Strength and weakness are often two sides of the same coin. Students will explore how a character's flaw can be a benefit.
When I see a quote, I often think, "That's not quite right!"