Screen-free math games, free VR field trips, and the BBC's Bluey library
Published 4 days ago • 12 min read
Hello Reader,
Happy back to school for some of you. Whatever time of year it is, I hope you’ll work hard to notice kids doing great things. My goal has always been to make the first contact home a positive one. I mentioned this on X and Teach Up Education said,
Agreed. I had a new student one year who just transferred in. And when I called home to tell his mom how great it was to have him in group, she paused and then, with a lot of relief in her voice said, "I've been waiting years to get this phone call." And now I work with her two youngest, and anytime I need something, she's right there to support.
Yes! That is awesome. I know it is busy and it is so so hard and exhausting to start the new school year, but working hard to notice positive things and call or email home is a great way to start the year.
In today’s newsletter, we’re going to talk about:
Screen-free math fluency games, research, and differentiation
Data Driven Leadership
Free virtual field trip ideas
How to use that VR headset in your classroom
Free Bluey resources for teaching younger children SEL
Hot stories in AI news and ethics that I've been reading and discussing with educators
OK I know that I do like technology but we also know that we need a mix of online and offline options to teach formatively so you'll be getting more ideas. Some of these have been around for years!
Let's get going!
Ideas for Elementary Math Classrooms
Elementary Math Fluency Ideas
Math Games that Build Fluency While Kids Have Fun with Dr. Gina Kling and Dr. Jennifer Bay-Williams | Episode 962
They also share their favorite games on the show notes including Salute (one player is the dealer and the other two each take a card and hold it on their forehead facing out without looking at it. The dealer looks at both cards and says the sum out loud. Each player looks at other players cards and figures out their own. They say kids love this one.) You can do this with the product instead of the sum as well. Lucky 13 and Go Fish For 10’s as well as other games are included in the show notes.
For those who want to discuss the common mistakes of teaching math facts (they say that the game "around the world" should be abandoned and timed math tests may not accomplish what you intend), here's a discussion guide for this show. 👉 e962-discussion-guide.pdf
How to Differentiate Instruction in Elementary Math with Dr. Carol Ann Tomlinson
Since we're talking math and you have a wide variety of ability levels, this wildly popular podcast from the vault includes ideas for elementary math teachers. If you’re an elementary math teacher who thinks it might be a struggle to reach your different learners, I’d take a listen.
Free BBC Resources for Your Classroom: Dinosaurs, Bluey, Planet Earth and News
Kimmie Fink shares printables, virtual field trip ideas, and fun archaeological dig resources for students at the BBC Learning Hub.
These resources are free and the videos are ad free from the BBC Learning hub. Create a free account in order to create playlists that you can send directly to Google Classroom. Episode 964 sponsored by BBC Learning Hub.
Data-Driven Leadership That Changes School Culture with Dr. Deborah Dennie | Episode 960
Deborah Dennie was an NASSP 2026 Middle Level National Principal of the year finalist and she is a principal in Maryland. She talks about how to be data driven and how she helps everyone get on board to improve attendance. She has lots of ideas. I’ve also included a sample prompt for teachers and one for principals and admin teams and tips for anonymizing data in the blog post.
👉 Each day when I share a podcast, I’m curating resources, finding free tools and sharing prompts so that you have more than a podcast. So, episode 960 is at www.coolcatteacher.com/e960 so you can see everything. I’m just including the highlights here in my newsletter but I urge you to go deep!
VR and XR in Your Classroom | Episode 961
Virtual Reality. If your school is lucky enough to have VR headsets, then great. Meghan Freeman will help you get started. However, I’ve also curated a bunch of free “virtual field trips” that you can take on a chromebook or any device. I love doing scavenger hunts in this way!
Extended Reality. Here are some of the free extended reality (XR) field trips you can do on any device for every subject. I highly recommend "scavenger hunts" where you have a list of what students will find or observe:
XR Guide — WebXR directory — use the search box at the top. This is a directory of experiences that run right in the browser, no headset and no app store required. Look for your subject.
NASA Commercial Crew Program VR Tours — my pick of the NASA collection, with versions built for grades 5–8 and grades 9–12. Here's what makes these different from most free VR: every tour comes with PDFs carrying NGSS standards, math standards, and actual lesson plans.
Here's one from the Preparing to Launch America guide: Build and Launch a Foam Rocket, a 60-minute activity for grades 2–8 that carries NGSS standards K-PS2-1, 3-PS2-2, and MS-ETS1-1, -3, and -4, and walks students through the full engineering design process. This is an example.
Google Arts & Culture — a huge repository of museums and field trips. If you don't have headsets and want your students to experience some trips, go to the homepage, pick your subject, and explore.
360Cities Video Gallery — 360° video from locations all over the world. Good for geography, world languages, and “show me where this story takes place.”
National Geographic on YouTube — and here's a trick worth teaching your students: look for the 360 icon on YouTube. Once you know to look for it, there's a whole layer of the platform you've been scrolling past.
Ancient Rome: The Colosseum — a free experience that takes students inside the Colosseum. A favorite of mine for world history.
Boeing FUTURE U Virtual Field Trips — 30-minute virtual field trips built with Discovery Education, with downloadable educator guides. Strong for CTE and career exploration.
Additionally, Four corners, The post-it round, think-pair-share, whiteboard responses, and reading records are five formative assessment strategies she explains and I capture in the show notes. If you want peer feedback strategies, go back and listen to this show, 5 Fantastic Peer Feedback Strategies for Your Classroom.
Leadership
With school starting back, our principals might need some ideas to connect better with students, teachers, and parents. We have a 2 part series airing on Cool Cat Talk right now to help. Part 1 just aired this Saturday with NASSP (now the National Principals Association - NPA). CEO Ronn Nozoe shares the results of the survey we did back in June with NASSP leaders and Cool Cat Teacher newsletter readers. (Thank you for participating).
Also, Muriel Summers who redesigned her school around the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and co-author of The Leader in Me with Stephen Covey had lots of ideas for promoting student leadership, even at the elementary level. I love her description of how it looked, felt, and sounded at her school as they changed the culture. (Or if you want the shorter version of Muriel's interview, grab her Motivational Monday episode that aired yesterday on the 10 Minute Teacher.)
The Leader in Me Level 1 Annotated Teacher's Edition (PDF) — This is a sampler. Open this one first if you teach the little ones. Habit 1 is a complete read-aloud lesson built around King Bidgood's in the Bathtub by Audrey Wood and The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, with before-you-read, while-you-read, and after-reading questions written out for you, plus cross-curricular extensions in language arts, social studies, science, and art.
The 7 Habits of Happy Kids (and teachers!) printable library — A K–5 teacher in Memphis put her whole set online: a classroom poster set, a 7 Habits clip chart, student certificates, character slips, bookmarks, coloring pages that pair with Sean Covey's book, a Habit 2 goal-setting sheet, a Think Win-Win graphic organizer, graphic organizers scaled up for grades 3–5, and 7 Habits songs. Every one is a direct download.
I've also posted five leadership activities for exploring your culture on the blog post for Muriel's episode. OK I was shocked at how Muriel involved her students in interviewing potential teachers, until I realized that when I was at Georgia Tech I was involved in selecting the Director of External Affairs and they listened to our feedback.
What's coming up?
So, this week we have Alice Keeler talking about how to Vibe Code with Gemini, Nneka McGee talking about how to teach quantum physics to littles (not kidding), Todd Brekhus from Renaissance Learning talking about Renaissance Intelligence and Jerry Kolber from Who Smarted? Talking about the show and how to integrate podcasts into the classroom. Oh, and Monday, we'll have Ashley Bendiksen talking about teaching boundaries to kids ages 5-9.
As always, I'll share lots of resources for each of those episodes.
AI News and Ethics
I'll admit that many of us are wrestling with what it means to write in the AI age. Now, on LinkedIn, people can mark your content "AI slop" (without any disclosure to you.) Substack has integrated with Pangram, an AI detector that is pretty good, however, false positives continue to be a debated issue. This summer, the winner of a short story prize was embroiled in controversy when it was said to have used AI, although the author denied it. Over 300 federal judges now require AI disclosure in their court cases.
A German court has ruled that Google is liable for false statements generated in AI overviews. But do our teachers and students even know that Google AI overviews are full of mistakes? I sure do. I would never cite them after I had to remove one source from a radio show that turned up in my fact check process and I was prepared to cite one at ISTE and in my fact checking, discovered it was totally hallucinated.
And in a recent study, 40% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said they wished they could remove generative AI from the world while at the same time "AI Guilt" is a thing as recent college graduates (who were never caught, mind you) feel an immense amount of regret that they didn't do any of their college coursework themselves. One person on reddit going so far as to redo many of her senior year assignments on her own. (Missing out on the feedback process, I would point out.) When researchers submitted AI-written exams into a UK university grading system, 94% went undetected and SCORED ABOVE THE AVERAGE REAL STUDENT.
And Katy ISD in Houston banned generative AI chat tools for grades k-6 and gradually allows teacher-supervised, authorized use starting grade 7. They also explicitly require that 8-12th grades cite all AI assistance in their work. (Now, that last piece was a requirement in my classroom and should be a given, IMHO.)
So, the first way I teach AI is to share the four paragraphs I just wrote with my students - hyperlinks and all. I have them read them and we discuss what they think. This is the first step of AI ethics as we openly discuss the issues of the day. But how do I start teaching AI? I summarized it here...
How I teach about AI.
I updated this post in July 2025 and 2026 to reflect what I had done each year. If you want to know how I teach about AI with kids with resources and handouts. Here are a few:
Quick Draw with Google - they draw and it tries to “recognize” what they drew. The gold is in the data sets you can see when you’re done.
Deep Fake Videos including one of “Elvis” and an ad with Bruce Willis in it. Both deep fakes.
AI Vocabulary Set - I made and update this set of AI vocabulary words with levels.
Spy the AI - test your knowledge of the AI vocabulary. I vibe coded this game. Here’s how.
Encouragement for You
Educator, your job is so important! You are important. Your job is not easy. I'm here to help. Thanks for those of you who emailed me after some personal notes in my last email newsletter. I see you and I appreciate that you see me.
And isn't that what teaching is about. Truly seeing our students and then helping them see the greatness in themselves and that they can persist and do hard things? Then, teaching them and working together.
I sat down with a student who is now a banker for me. We talked about my class. That was well over 15 years ago now. Like it was yesterday. He says they talk about the predictions and the technology change every time they get together as a class that we made in my classroom. Wow, that means so much to me.
And now, this means so much to me. This newsletter that took me three hours to write - by hand, I guess you would say, even though I typed it. Even though I just used a dash.
But I will say that I always use my AI fact checker tool I've built as a skill in Claude. It turned up some misspellings, asked me which court made the ruling above, and found at least one dead link. I think that's useful. After I write, to have AI do a fact check for me based on how I've programmed it. That's a win and I won't apologize for being more accurate. And that is the thing, we need to focus on ways that AI can make us better humans not on ways that AI can be sub par copies of us.
We don't get better by just getting by. Tomorrow is not better than today if today is worse than yesterday. OK I know, I know, my husband and I have been talking about circular Greek logic, so I'll move on.
If you know me and have read my newsletter, you know what I sound like. And we have a human connection through these words. And I hope you're finding lots of things you can do with your students and your team. And I hope you're finding other educators who inspire you. You are amazing. You deserve lots of people who will support you with great handmade content. I happen to think human-crafted will always have a premium even as the world is trying to sort things out.
You don't get something for nothing. You always reap what you sow, later than you sow, and more than you sow. If you plant watermelons, you don't harvest corn. If you plant honesty, you will reap the benefits.
As always, if you have something to say, just hit reply. I read every message. Sometimes it takes a minute because of the incredibly robust spam filters I use but I will reply.
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