Issue 34 • April 23, 2025

Puns, dad jokes, and corny sayings are how eye roll! 🙄

If you’ve ever played one of my Shapegrams videos for your students, you know I’m grate at sprinkling in cheesy jokes and wordplay.

A rebus is a playful puzzle or message where words are represented by a mix of pictures, letters, and symbols. Emojis make great rebus pieces—they're fun, visual, and easy to use.

Rebuses can tickle your brain as you try to decode the message. In this issue, you’ll find a sample Google Form where students can practice a special kind of rebus called a gramogram. Plus, I’ve got a couple other activities that involve emojis.

Answer Assurance ✅

I love using a Google Form with short answer questions where every submission is 100% correct. This makes grading super easy, and it requires students to persevere until they get each answer right.

Try my Gramograms form to see what I mean. Gramograms are a type of rebus where letters and numbers sound like words and phrases when read aloud. For example, RUOK sounds like “Are you OK?” when read aloud.

When you try the form, you’ll notice that if you enter an incorrect response, it says, “Try again!” You can’t submit the form until all questions are answered correctly.

This setup uses Google Forms’ response validation feature. Here’s how to create a form with built-in Answer Assurance:

1. Add a required Short answer question.

2. Click More (⋮) and choose Response validation.

3. Choose Text, enter the correct response, and write a custom error message.

4. Each question can only have one correct response, so use the description field to clarify capitalization and punctuation if needed.

5. Add more questions by duplicating and changing the question, answer,  and error text.

6. Click Preview to test your form before sharing it with students.

Decode the Destination 🗺️

Last month I unveiled my big collection of digital brain breaks, which I lovingly call Digital Snacks. Categories include Physical, Cognitive, Relaxing, Social, Humor, Sensory, and Creative. Each category includes free web-based activities that don’t require logging in for students. Each category also includes a Videos section.

In the Cognitive Videos section, I want to spotlight Emoji Countries. This video features nearly two dozen countries represented as emoji rebus puzzles for students to solve before the answer is revealed. Some are tricky—especially if students aren’t familiar with the country—so I recommend watching as a class and pausing the video to give everyone time to think and guess.

Here are a few examples from the video:

• 🆄 🏗️ = Ukraine

• 🧊 🅰 = Cuba

• 🅹 🍳 = Japan

If your students enjoy these kinds of rebus puzzles, the Guessr YouTube channel has many more!

Frayer Fun 🥳

The Frayer Model is a four-square graphic organizer that helps students learn vocabulary by breaking a word down into its definition, characteristics, examples, and non-examples. It’s a simple structure that gets students talking, checking their understanding, and making those new words stick.

Emoji Kitchen lets you mash two emojis into one fun sticker. It’s a playful way to blend meaning and spark creativity—the results are often funny, surprising, or just plain weird (in the best way).

Peggy Reimers shares a clever twist on the Frayer Model in a recent TCEA blog post. Students use Emoji Kitchen stickers to illustrate each of the four quadrants in the organizer.

As Peggy puts it, “Combining Emoji Kitchen with the Frayer Model is a fun and creative way to make vocabulary learning more meaningful (and way more engaging, IMHO).”

Choices and Chances in Canva ☸️

Canva has over 300 apps that can add some pretty nifty functionality to your designs.

One worth checking out is Lucky Wheel, which lets you embed a customizable spinning wheel directly into your design. It’s great for adding interactivity to lessons, presentations, or classroom games.

To get started, open your Canva design, click Apps in the left sidebar, and search for Lucky Wheel. In the panel that opens, choose a color scheme and enter your items. Items might be names, prizes, vocabulary words, numbers, or tasks. Just keep in mind that the total character limit for the wheel is 250, so if you’re using student names, you may need to skip last names.

Click (or double-click) the center of the wheel to spin. After a few seconds, the wheel lands on a space and displays the selected item.

You can spin while editing or presenting, and you can even add multiple wheels to a single design.

Spinning wheels are great for random checks for understanding, wildcard reflection prompts, vocabulary reviews, or surprise discussion questions.

Peculiar Prompting 🧐

If you’re working with AI chatbots, a little personality can go a long way. I’ve put together a one-pager called Unconventional Chatbot Prompting—it’s filled with playful and creative ways to get more useful, relevant, and human-like responses from AI. Whether you’re telling the bot “No yapping,” giving it a confidence boost with “I know you can do better than that,” or prompting it to reflect with “Then rate your response,” these out-of-the-box ideas can make your interactions more effective (and more fun).

Talk to Text 💬

Did you know that if you add an audio file to Apple Notes on iPhone, iPad, or Mac, it will automatically transcribe it? This works with imported audio or audio recorded directly in the notes app (but it may take a few minutes for the transcript to appear).

When a transcript is available, you’ll see a preview. Click the preview to open and view the full transcript.

If you don’t see a transcript, your device might not meet the system requirements or the audio may not be in a supported language.

You can read, search, and copy a transcript’s text—and even click a word to jump to that exact moment in the recording.

It’s handy to copy the text and paste it into a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini. Ask the bot for bullet points, action items, key moments, or a custom summary to help you make sense of the audio quickly and clearly.

Many of the ideas in this newsletter come to life in my presentations and workshops. If you’re planning summer professional learning and looking for a speaker, I’d love to be part of it!

My sessions aren’t just packed with relevant, ready-to-use ideas—they’re hands-on, high-energy, and designed to leave teachers feeling confident, creative, and inspired. It’s a “GR8” way to kick off the school year with curiosity, creativity, and a healthy dose of wordplay.

C U L8R 🐊,

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Al was used to revise and proofread some of the text in this newsletter. It was also used to generate possibilities for section titles.