 The week before Thanksgiving it's easy to feel a little scattered! For teachers AND students. It can be nice to take a break from your main unit and focus on some activities that still promote ELA skills but give kids something freshly engaging to focus on. Since I imagine your attention is a bit divided at the moment between lesson planning, menu planning, and maybe even packing lists, I'd like to give you three day's worth of activities that you can plug and play next week to take the pressure off yourself.  Links Mentioned in the Show: Preview the fun Black Friday week deals (including The Lighthouse $1 trial) here.  Free Native American Heritage Month Display: You can grab it here. You can make your copy of the guided gratitude journal and thank you notes here.  Get the poetry tiles here.   Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!     

238: Let me Plan your ELA Lessons the Week before Thanksgiving

Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts?

You're in the right place!

Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. 

Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more.

Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers.

Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. 

Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out.

Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to make your library more appealing, and find out how to be a top P.R. agent for books in your classroom. 

In it for the interviews? Fabulous! Find out about project-based-learning, innovative school design, what really helps kids learn deeply, design thinking, how to choose diverse texts, when to scaffold sketchnotes lessons, building your first writing makerspace, cultivating writer's notebooks, getting started with genius hour, and so much more, from our wonderful guests. 

Here at The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, discover you're not alone as a creative English teacher. You're part of a vast community welcoming students to their next escape room, rolling out contemporary poetry and reading aloud on First Chapter Fridays, engaging kids with social media projects and real-world ELA units. 

As your host (hi, I'm Betsy), I'm here to help you ENJOY your days at school and feel inspired by all the creative ways to teach both contemporary works and the classics your school may be pushing. I taught ELA at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels both in the United States and overseas for almost a decade, and I didn't always get support for my creativity. Now I'm here to make sure YOU get the creative support you deserve, and it brings me so much joy. 

Welcome to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies!

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 With exam season coming up, you're probably looking for some creative ELA review activities.   Whether your school requires that students sit a traditional exam, or you have room for something like the graduation speech final or another type of final project, it's helpful to look back over the big concepts, themes, and texts you've covered as the year draws to a close.   So what options do you have besides printing out a 20 page review packet and giving students time to study it? A lot, as it turns out. Today we're going to explore five of them, in hopes that you'll find a match that feels just right to you.   Before we get started, I want you to know that I'll be running Camp Creative, The Easiest Roadmap to Student Podcasting, in June. Inside this (free) and fun PD, you'll get access to the best models, easiest tech, and complete curriculum to get you and your students started with podcast projects. Everything arrives by email, so even if you're busy the week of June 10-14, you can catch up whenever you get a chance. It just takes 10 minutes a day to go through the materials!  Links Mentioned:  Grab your Copy of the Review Quiz Game Here:   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s2HlNyX8Zh9_WYnJsZmTgbbLvGjewzhDnAn8aPgXg2U/copy   Sign up for Camp Creative Here: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/camppodcasting2024    Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

293: Creative Exam Review Activities for ELA (that don't involve a packet)

Today, I want to highlight a useful tool Amanda Cardenas shared earlier this year on the show called The Sesame Street Quiz. It’s so versatile, so fun, and so helpful that I feel it deserves a show of its own, so here we go.  Amanda has already shared with us how these work, back in episode 267. Here’s a quick review:  A Sesame Street Quiz gives students four items. Three are connected and one is an outlier. For example, if you’re reading Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, you might give students the options: Daisy, Jordan, floating, red. Which three are connected and why? Which one is the outlier and why? Amanda lets kids use their book and notes as they respond. Now, think about this idea of a Sesame Street Quiz. It’s a great way to check in and see which kids are doing the reading, and understanding the reading. But how else might you use it? It could make a great bellringer or discussion warm-up. Have students make their decisions alone or with a partner, justifying their choices.  It could make for an intriguing way to review before a final exam. Invite students to consider the key texts of the term, and choose which ones go together and which is an outlier. It could lead into a fascinating one-pager assessment, with kids creating a visual representation of the three that group together and integrating quotations and analysis in their own words of why those three link. It could be a helpful exit ticket, to see how well students digested the material from the lesson if you’ve been deep diving into a text. I bet you can think of lots more uses as well! But however you use it, this week I just want to highly recommend that you give a Sesame Street question a try ASAP.    Related Links:  Episode 267, with Amanda Cardenas:  https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2024/03/so-your-students-arent-doing-the-reading-heres-help.html  Explore more of Amanda's work: https://www.mudandinkteaching.org/     Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

292: Try the Sesame Street Quiz (5 Different Ways)

 Have you ever wished you could get students excited about genius hour, then immediately wondered what you’d do if half of them couldn’t think of a topic? Well, today on the podcast, creative teacher Melissa Moser is here to talk about one of her favorite electives to teach - Genius Hour, and exactly how she sets students up for success - even the ones who just don’t know what passion to pursue when it comes to a passion project.    This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I think you’re going to love all the specifics Melissa shares.    Ooh, and real quick, if you’re wondering what I mean by genius hour, I’d like to suggest you hit pause and go back to episode 122,  The Ultimate Guide to Genius Hour. You’ll enjoy this amazing case study so much more once you understand exactly what it means to give your students the time and space to study their own greatest interests in a genius hour project. OK, let’s dive in!    Links from Today's Episode:  The Ultimate Guide to Genius Hour (Episode 122)  The Genius Hour Curriculum Information about The Lighthouse   Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

291: When Genius Hour WORKS (The Elective Series)

   Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to share a fun visual trick for helping students vary their sentence structure.  I never really thought about sentence length until I was writing professionally. Sure, I knew to avoid run-on sentences, how to wield a semicolon, and what an appositive could do. But really it was when I realized I wanted to vary my sentence LENGTH in the articles I was writing for other websites that I started playing with structure more.  I wanted punchy moments. I also wanted long, detailed stories that could twist and turn through the text, capturing my reader’s imagination with sensory imagery and vivid descriptions. The combination of both led to more exciting writing with more varied types of structure. It’s not that I went into a line thinking “I want to use an appositive, three commas, and a semicolon here.” It’s that I was trying to write a long sentence after a short sentence, so I experimented. There’s an easy way to guide students to do the same thing. I call it “Shaped Stories.” Simply create a handout or slide with a photo at the top, and a big black rectangle down below. Then add white rectangles on the big black one, each a space for students’ sentences going down the page, and make the white rectangles different sizes. Leave a tiny rectangle where a sentence will have to be just two or three words. Then add a wide, tall one where a sentence would have to be complex to fill it. Then try medium-size, and so on and so forth down the page. When you invite students to set a story inside the picture prompt at the top, ask them to fill each box completely with their sentences. Show them your example, and feel free to review a few types of sentence structures that might help them out.  When it comes to varied sentence structure, shaped stories are an easy (and fun) hack for helping students practice. That’s why this week I want to highly recommend you take a peek at the visuals in the show notes for inspiration and then give it a try.  Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.   Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!      

290: Try this Hack to Teach Varied Sentence Structure

 Book talk podcasts can provide gentle choice reading accountability, target presentation of knowledge and speaking skills, and build a library of book recommendations for future students. Not bad, right? Today on the podcast I'm going to walk you through how to launch a book talk podcast with your students, and why it will be fantastic. Example Script:   https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Aj__-O8kwEJTXr_-3o7AU9B15sSQYIIFyn-cy-HSkUQ/edit?usp=sharing    Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram.  Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you!   

238: Let me Plan your ELA Lessons the Week before Thanksgiving

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