Do you have old books lying around taking up space in your classroom? Books no one is ever going to read again? Recently in our Facebook group, Creative High School English, a fun visual thread erupted all about bookish page displays. So in today’s one minute idea-isode, I want to suggest you try one. You’ll clear space on your shelves, help the earth with your reuse/recycle mentality, and end up with a stunning display. Here’s how… Start by pulling the pages out of some old books. It will feel weird, I know. Save a few for the next time you’re going to do a blackout poetry project, but stack up the rest and head to your bulletin board or wall.  Ideally you’ll now work on a solid color, so paper the back of your bulletin board or choose an area of your wall with nothing on it. Next it’s time to staple or tape your pages up in the design of your choice. You might create a river of pages coming across your bulletin board, paper the bulletin board entirely in pages so it’s filled in entirely, or form the pages into a shape, like a tree, a bird, or a spiral.   Last but not least, it’s time to overlay a bookish quotation on top. Choose from the dozens of wonderful ones out there from the last few centuries of authors. You can cut out letters to make a big and bold statement, or hand letter your quotation onto a big piece of paper you can overlay on the pages.  OK, that’s a wrap on today’s episode. If you’d like more display ideas for your ELA classroom, head to the blog version linked below where you’ll see 10 fun visuals to inspire your next display.  Visit the Full ELA Bulletin Board / Display Ideas Post: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2024/09/10-creative-ela-bulletin-boards-for-middle-and-high-school.html    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!   

On this week’s mini-episode, I want to tell you about a one week unit that has never failed to produce incredible results from my students. I’ve done it with 10th graders and 11th graders, honors students and their counterparts, American students and Bulgarian students speaking English as their second language. And I’ve loved it every. Single. Time. Wow, it’s kind of fun setting up all this suspense, but as you know, Thursday episodes are quick, so we better hop to it. The one week unit I’ve loved every time is a poetry slam unit, and I think you should try it too. Let’s walk through the week. On Monday I introduce the concept of slam. I explain the arbitrary judging, the standing up with your poem and your guts and your dream, and I explain that we’re having one on Friday. I share some of my favorite performance pieces to help kids start thinking through what performance poetry is, and I invite them to score the poems on a 1-10 as if we were having our own slam already. Hilarious disagreements ensue, and everyone quickly realizes that judging is incredibly subjective. As we get ready to prep for our slam on the next three days, I let kids sign up to be on committees that will take care of the Slam venue, the slam judging and P.R., and the slam program and emceeing.  On Tuesday, we roll into poetic devices and performance techniques, looking at, analyzing and scoring more performance poetry and beginning to workshop ideas for their own poems. We write “I am from” poems. We meet in committees. Everything seems incredibly important, because everyone knows they’ll be performing a poem in just three days. On Wednesday, we watch more poems, write more poems, and meet in committees again. At this point, most kids are zeroing in on a poem to perform in the slam. I check in with the venue committee to make sure they are formally requesting use of whatever school space they want to use on Friday and that they get approval. I check in with the program committee to make sure they are getting everyone’s titles, figuring out a fair order, and prepping an emcee who will do the event justice. I check in with the judging committee to make sure they’ve reached out respectfully to possible guest judges in the community and that they are getting some acceptances.  On Thursday, everyone is writing madly and practicing intensely. They perform alone, perform for partners, ask me questions, and keep experimenting. We might watch a few more performances. We’ll definitely meet in committees again. On Friday, everyone arrives ready (and very nervous) for what is always one of the best days of the year. The venue committee has the ambiance dialed in, usually with refreshments, fun lighting, and a surprising location. The emcee steps up to the plate and keeps everything going. The guest judges lend an air of professionalism, and make everything feel higher stakes. The poets tend to surprise themselves. I love it every time!  OK, that’s a wrap on today’s quick episode. I hope I’ve convinced you to try a poetry slam this year when you teach poetry. For me, it’s the mini-unit that never fails to engage kids around poetry in a way they didn’t expect.   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! 

Let's talk about dystopia book clubs, a compelling unit option for ELA. I taught my first dystopian fiction, 1984, to tenth graders in Bulgaria. They had very strong reactions to the way Orwell portrayed communism, since Communist rule had existed in their family's living memories. For some, Orwell nailed it. Others, outraged, clearly thought he was slandering their country's history. For everyone, the line between fiction and fact in the text felt blurry. Perhaps because of its intensity, its emotional nature, its closeness to actual events, they found it didn't read as fiction. Thinking back, I'd now say they felt it was fiction with an agenda. Fiction with a clear argument that used evidence like characterization, setting, tone, and mood to drive home its thesis. That experience has flavored the way I've read all the dystopia I've picked up since - Fahrenheit 451, The Hunger Games, Scythe, Dry... And I think it leads to fascinating questions to bring to kids. How does dystopia wield its influence? Where is the line between art and propaganda? What do dystopian authors have in their writing arsenal that other authors don't? Today I hope to convince you that dystopian book clubs are worth your time, and give you the building blocks to design your unit. We're going to talk texts, activities, and assessment possibilities. Links Mentioned:  1984 Apple Commercial Motorola Empower the People Commercial Dismaland (Maddox Gallery Writeup) Dismaland Video Tour WWI Posters from the Library of Congress   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! 

On this week’s mini-episode, I’d like to challenge you to get your students set up on Canva and help them get comfortable on the platform with a simple assignment that will give you a great fall display, literary travel posters. Have you seen PBS’ The Great Read posters, which are available for free download on the PBS site? I’ll link them in the show notes. They’re fabulous. Each poster invites the viewer into a literary world. “Join Don Quixote on an Epic Quest” is overlaid on a lovely background of receding windmills with a small warning note, “Be Wary of Hulking Giants.” “Visit Wonderland” is fixed above a drawing of Alice falling down between purple mushrooms, with the catchy tagline, “See as many as six impossible things before breakfast!” The series includes Dune, Narnia, Harry Potter, 1984, Huck Finn, Gatsby, and more. They’re stellar additions to your classroom decor, for sure, but they also lend themselves beautifully as visual mentor texts for this little project. Ask students to choose a book that’s been meaningful to them in the past, one with a richly imagined setting. Show them the PBS posters and ask them what components seem consistent across the posters. Ask them to consider which posters they find most appealing and why, then use similar components in designing their own, on Canva.  If you’re new to Canva, I’m going to link a free step-by-step course I made for you so you can easily learn the basics that will help you and your students with a project like this.  Starting with a simple project like this one is a great way to get everyone oriented onto the platform and help students warm up to design work, at the same time that you create a fun book-focused set of posters you can use on your door, in your hallway, or around your classroom library.  OK, that’s a wrap on today’s quick episode. I hope you’re heading over now to set up a free Canva for Education account if you don’t have one yet! And no, I’m still not sponsored by them, but feel free to suggest me to any Canva Executives you know.   Check out PBS' The Great Read Poster Series: https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/resources/downloads/ Take the free Canva Confidence Course: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/getCanvaconfidence  See an example poster I designed (guess what book it's from!):   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!   

Video is everywhere in communication these days, including on Reels, TikTok, and Youtube, where our students are. Building creative video projects into ELA can help leverage students' interests in these platforms toward building skills in research, storytelling, speaking, and building an argument. Not to mention skills within the genre itself, which are bound to come in handy in many fields. So today let's dive into video in ELA. We'll cover the best tech platform for straightforward editing, and explore six different project ideas. Hopefully by the end of today's episode, you'll be feeling excited instead of intimidated to get started with your first classroom video project. Related Links: Tutorial for creating videos in Canva: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/videopage/createavideo  Sign up for a free Canva for Education Account: https://www.canva.com/education/  Free Canva Confidence course: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/getCanvaconfidence Amanda Gorman's "Earthrise": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwOvBv8RLmo  Ada Limón's "A Poem for Europa": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgWbeDNPD6o  "Enryo" (stop motion animation film): https://smilodon-tulip-cb8w.squarespace.com/winning-submissions (2nd video down) Documentary Project Unit on TPT (also in the video projects section of The Lighthouse):  https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Documentary-Film-Project-l-ELA-Project-l-ELA-Projects--10462782?st=a50b80660705713d043c9b0e88e8adbd&utm_source=Spark%20Podcast%209%2F10%2F24&utm_campaign=documentary%20film%20project    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!   

On this week’s mini-episode, let’s talk about how to build an audio assignment in early in the year without feeling intimidated. Maybe you joined me for Camp Creative last summer and you’ve got alllll the student podcasting background, or maybe you’re new to the topic and feeling a bit wary. Either way, this episode is for you! Let’s walk through how to add a short audio assignment to your fall lineup that paves the way for more complex assignments later on. First things first, you don’t need to use Garageband or Audacity for your mini audio assignment. Just let kids record on Chrome, using the Vocaroo website. There’s really just a big red button for them to push, and then an invitation to download their audio. It’s that simple. Second things second, your first audio assignment can be just 90 seconds. This is a warm-up for what’s to come, and you just want your students to realize that they can communicate an idea through a recorded audio, and warm-up to the idea.  And now, the part you’ve all been waiting for. What will they record? Here are three ideas. Let kids record a quick story about themselves as part of your icebreaker/relationship-building series. Give them a starter, like “Hi, my name is ______, and I think you’ll be surprised by what once happened to me…” or “Hey there, I’m ________, and today I want to tell you about the time I……” Be sure to say up front if you’re going to invite students to share these back to the class or keep them private. Ask students to record a short book review about their favorite book. You’ll get to know your students better as readers, and pave the way for your choice reading program too. If you want to go further, pull some of the most reviewed favorite books from your library or the school library and create a display with them, or create a slide deck featuring top recommended favorite books with links to student audio reviews. Finally, you might create a mini-audio assignment around the popular prompt “What I wish my teacher knew.” This one would be for your ears only, and likely help you understand your students better going into the year at the same time that they get a chance to get familiar with the idea of recording audio.  OK, that’s a wrap on today’s quick episode. Remember, audio is a powerful means of communication, and students can explore it without any high-tech hoopla. Start with something simple, and build from there.   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!   

We moved this month, and it wasn’t one of your quick moves. We did one of those once, from one cabin to the one next door, carrying our furniture and baskets of stuff across a soon well-worn path through the woods. But no, this one was an international move across four flights and nine time zones, with some of our stuff going by shipping container across the Atlantic, some by moving truck across the U.S., and some by plane with us. And then there was the cat. Anyway, I’ve been meeting a lot of new people and trying to describe my work, which is always a humorous challenge. "I write curriculum for creative English teachers," I might say. "I’m a podcaster." "I help English teachers try out new creative methods. I love it." People nod and smile, but really, they have no idea what I mean. There’s no glow of recognition like when I used to say “I’m a teacher.” All this introducing myself has made me think about what’s really important to me, and I want to re-introduce myself here, with my own little spinoff of NPR’s famous “This I believe” series (one of my favorite writing units, by the way, check out episode 76). So here goes. I guess you could call this my manifesto.   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!

On this week’s mini-episode, I want to talk about learning names, and my easy trick for mastery. It took me many years, but finally, after a year in which I had a Kalina, Karina, Ekaterina, and Katrina, I figured out a plan that really worked.   I hate not knowing students’ names. It stresses me out, big time. Maybe you’re the same? The worst is when I think I know someone’s name and then it’s actually someone else’s name, so I feel like I betrayed them both.  So finally, after about five years of teaching, I stumbled upon the idea of name tents. I printed everyone’s name in big block letters on a different color of cardstock for each class, and I set them out on day one before students came in. They sat with their name card, I read the card every time I wanted to talk to them. Bingo.  But it was still hard. I didn’t know their names when I saw them at lunch, or in the hall, and they had to sit in my random seating chart every day which wasn’t always ideal.  Then one year I decided I would have them decorate the name tents. They added favorite quotes, activities they liked, books or authors they loved, and drawings. This helped me get to know them better and gave me starting points for pre-class banter. It was a step forward in the name-learning evolution.  But then came the moment I struck gold. I had my camera in class for taking a first day class photo, since one of my favorite first day activities was to challenge students to choose a place on campus and create some kind of fun class pose for a photo I would then print for our room. And yes, it was an actual camera, before I had a smartphone. I noticed my camera while students were decorating their name tents, and I asked if I could take their pictures holding up their name cards. Though some kids joked around about it feeling like a mug shot, no one really minded once I explained how it would help me memorize names quickly.  In two minutes I circled the class, giving myself an easy way to study each student’s face with their name and some of their top interests. That night I scrolled and practiced, repeating any name I didn’t get the on the first try over and over as I went back and forth from picture to picture. After a couple of sessions, I had every name down, and I walked in the next day with happy confidence. It made a huge difference to me to be able to focus on getting my classes up and running without worrying about memorizing names. I kept the name tents out for a while so everyone could learn each other’s names and interests, but I didn’t rely on them any more. And I repeated the same process in every class for the rest of my time in the classroom.  This week, as many folks return to school around the country, I highly recommend you give this strategy a try. The combination of name tents and photos (assuming you’re allowed to take photos at your school) is a name-learning match made in heaven. 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!   

Jason Reynolds' website headline reads "Here's What I Do: Not Write Boring books." How great is that? As with everything he does, he seems to be speaking directly to the young people he's always trying to reach. There's a reason The Library of Congress chose him as the national ambassador for young adult literature. Last year I created an Instagram series all about Jason's incredible work, and different ways you might use it in the classroom. But I've heard from a number of folks who aren't on Instagram, or who'd just like a deeper dive, so today I've decided to walk through that series here on the podcast, explaining everything I know about Jason Reynolds' arc of work and how you can use it in your classroom. As always, I will share my recommendations here with the caveat that you know your students, parents, and community best, so you should preview content before sharing it in class. Ready to dive in? I'm excited! 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! 

On this week’s mini-episode, I’m sharing the coolest discussion warm-up I’ve ever learned, which I picked up at the Exeter Humanities Institute one week after my first year of teaching and the same week that I met my husband. You’re going to love it!  As you know if you listen to the podcast much, my favorite discussion method is called Harkness, and it was first invented and pioneered at Phillips Exeter Academy. If you’re interested in diving deep with Harkness, there are several past episodes you could explore, including number 8 and number 73. But today I just want to share this super simple discussion warm-up I learned there, which I’ve used and riffed off of dozens of times since and love.  Here’s the idea. As you roll out the runway to discussion, you invite students to write down a discussion question about the reading. Something they’d like to hear from others about - something that goes deeper than plot. Easy, and I know, not exactly revolutionary. But here’s the twist. Then you have all your students put their questions into a hat, and pull out someone else’s. They now have a new question to consider and contribute, and someone else is in charge of theirs. Now, you still might want to do a quick “turn to a partner and talk about your questions for two minutes” or even a quickwrite on the new question, but the main thing is, students will suddenly have a whole new motivation to bring up the question they’re holding in the discussion.  After all, they aren’t putting their own question under public scrutiny. And I think they feel a little sense of responsibility to the person whose question they picked up. Now when you say “who wants to get things rolling by reading their question out loud?” there’s very little to lose in kickstarting the conversation. Similarly, when the discussion hits a bump, and you encourage kids to continue it with new questions, you’re more likely to have takers. It’s such a simple idea, but I’ve loved seeing it play out in conversations in class after class, so this week, I want to highly recommend that you give it a try too. And then maybe dive a little deeper into Harkness yourself and see if you love it as much as I do. Maybe you’ll even want to go to the Exeter Humanities Institute one summer too - it’s pretty amazing, and I’m not just saying that because I met my husband there.   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!