Now that our Personal Project Exhibition is over, I thought the Grade 10s needed something a little different in their advisory sessions. I has an old worksheet with 12 visual riddles on, but decided to find more. I'll have one of these up on my screen every morning as they arrive to home room.
Here's the link (Answers are in the notes!). The presentation has 100 different riddles!

Answers:

• Breakfast 
  
• tunafish 
  
• friends in high places
  
• ready for more
  
• two steps forward, one step back
  
• right between the eyes

Here's the complete presentation:

I was lucky enough to spend the last weekend in Washington DC, hopping between museums and galleries. One of the things which inspired me was a card game designed to get people to discuss their ideals, which was playable at the American Museum of History.

There was a table set up with four matching decks of cards (each card has an image on it). In the middle there was a spinner which would select one word when stopped. You were invited to pick out four cards which related to that word, and then share your selections with the other players.

Here are some photos I took at the museum (excuse the quality):

I decided that this would be a fantastic game to play with my students and would stimulate some rich discussion. I remade the game, with the same instructions, but different images (images from PhotosForClass, which have the citation on the bottom). I've also made sure the images are all fairly ambiguous. Link to my presentation here. 
InstructionsDo you have shared ideals?

• Pick a word from the next slide
• Each player has a set of identical cards
• Without showing others, pick four cards which you think best fit the word. Place them face down in front of you.
• When everyone is ready, turn your cards face up.
• Now discuss the images you selected.
  • Did you pick different images? Find out why?
  • Did you pick the same image, but for different reasons?
• Choose a new issue and start again!

Of course because I am a big IB MYP nerd, I had to make some MYP specific cards! I decided to make another deck, with different pictures, and the ideals replaced with MYP Key Concepts! I would use this for an introduction to the MYP session for students and parents OR for MYP Training for teachers. I changed the rules slightly so that:
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1. Only two cards are selected
2. After revealing the cards the players need to decide on which one card best represents the key concept.

You could also use this deck at the beginning of a unit, when you introduce the key concept (you could also make a similar version of this game, but for your subject, and you could include only that group's key concepts, along with the related concepts)!

Link to Key Concepts Cards here.

Enjoy - let me know if you use this!
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I've put together a stand alone research lesson for some of my students, because of two big problems I often face:

• Students will be given a task/topic, and they will just go to a source and take notes of what they read.
• Students will come up with a topic, but will be overwhelmed and will not know where to begin!

My activity gets students to come up with research questions, make assumptions, then they will do their research...and it's all based on songs!

I start off by having students brainstorm what sort of questions they should answer to understand their song, (at this point, they don't know what song they have been assigned - so you can start this as a group activity). Then they get the song title and artist and have a few minutes to come up with more questions and assumptions. Then they get given the lyrics, and finally they get given a photo of the artist(s). Only after they have looked at all these, are they allowed to go online to answer their questions.
The lesson will end with students sharing out what they learnt, and then we will listen to a clip from the five songs!

TheSongs:

• Jeffrey Lewis - Sad Screaming Old Man
• Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell - The Shadow Waltz
• Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar - Typewriter
• The Spook School - Speak When You’re Spoken To
• Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - Pon Pon Pon

(I basically picked songs I like...BUT also I thought this was an interesting mix. Three have English lyrics, one has Hindi, (with some English) and one in Japanese (with some English). Some are original songs, some are songs made famous by films, (one is in a film from the 70s, then made famous through being in a Wes Anderson film)....Also there are lots of other little extra facts they might find out - for example 'Pon Pon Pon' is the onomatopoeia for clapping, but it also sounds like the Japanese word for bread, so at one point in the video, the artist is clapping, and bread is flying from her hands!

• Here is the presentation
• Here are the Photos
• Here are the Lyrics
• Here is the Research Sheet

Feel free to use / adapt with songs you like. Also could be useful for a language acquisition class!