Fifteen Problems I Stole from Fawn Nguyen

On Friday mornings, I run what is called Math Academy at our school. I give students one to three problems (usually I try to make it just one). They have from 7:15 until 7:45 to work it out. I had trouble getting problems that were engaging and challenging as the year pushed on. More often than not I turned to the blog or Twitter page of Fawn Nguyen and my needs were met. I either stole problems directly from her or stole problems that she stole from someone else. Good thing stealing is allowed. Here are fifteen I really like:

1. Visual Pattern #3 by Fawn Ngyuen
2. Visual Pattern #5 by Fawn Ngyuen
3. This problem about the band fundraiser. I wouldn't link this to any particular sixth grade standard. 
4. Ten dimes weigh an ounce. How much does $1000 in dimes weigh? 
5. Splitting the cost of a house (not evenly) and then reselling that same house. How much should each person get? 
6. Three two-sided chips
7. Love the way that this Reversing the Question prompt was set up with the four multiple choices not even shown initially. 
8. The missing area problem. 
9. The Dad's Cookie Problem. 
10. Put the digits in the right place for a 3 digit times a 2 digit number.
11. There are a million unit rate lessons out there, but I like everything about the way that Fawn constructs this one in which she compares a new hot spot for smoothies to Starbucks. Fawn talks about the numerous reasons she likes the lesson in the link, but to me the one thing that sticks out is that the math and the real world connections are in the Goldilocks land of not too hard, but not too easy. 
12. Hotel Snap was also given to NCTM Illuminations by Fawn. I actually used this one this past year, but it was way too much for my sixth graders. Fawn actually suggests starting with a smaller hotel that only uses ten cubes. I didn't see this article at the time or I just thought eh my kids will be fine. 
13. The Test Drive. I think this would go really well with teaching double number lines or anything ratio. 
14. This one was really really hard. Not for the kids. They haven't tried it yet. I have. I got it wrong. A little bit of fractions, proportions, percentages all wrapped into one. 
15. Generate the smallest and largest answers. This is a great tool for teaching students how to make sense of answers with fractions. They usually try to memorize and it's a way for them to think logically particularly regarding the division operation.