The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA

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! 

The first time I really understood what flow meant I was barefoot in salty sand, building a beach sculpture in Mexico alone in the sunshine. Two hours seemed to disappear in moments as I gathered water-smoothed scraps of painted tile and bright shells and arranged them into swirls and towers underneath the cliffs. Take a second here and ask yourself - when do you feel that amazing feeling, where you are completely immersed in the thing you are doing so the rest of the world falls away? When do you think your students do? We’ve all noticed the challenges our students are facing right now in focusing their attention. They’ve got addictive technology, constant social FOMO, and a streaming feed of big world problems competing for their attention every moment of the day. So how are they supposed to find their flow, or even their focus? Today’s guest, Angela Watson, has turned her attention carefully to this matter in recent years. She’s here today to talk with us about how we can help our students find their way back to focus, and we all know how important that is right now. So let’s dive in! Go Further with Angela Watson Angela Watson is a National Board Certified Teacher with a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction. She has 11 years of classroom experience and over a decade of experience as an instructional coach. Angela’s mission is to help teachers live a more purposeful and conscious life. Through her mentorship, countless teachers have learned to take charge of their time and energy so they can prevent burnout and stay in the profession they love for years to come. Check out her new curriculum for middle or high school at Finding Flow Solutions. Explore her website, Truth for Teachers.   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 give my answer to a question I see all the time in our  Facebook community, Creative High School English, and it’s this: What’s the best way to spend a teacher budget? So let’s dive into five great options. .  Classroom Poster Printing Over the years I’ve seen a lot of wonderful classroom poster creation from fellow educators and artists across the world. And they look beautiful in framed 8 1/2 X 11. But what if you took your digital download and went bigger? Larger 18 X 24 inch posters in a glossy finish are just $15 when you print them through Canva, and then you can frame them, if you wish, in relatively inexpensive poster frames from Amazon. Larger scale decor in your classroom draws the eye without being overwhelming. Choose colors and art that you love and you can use it year after year. Maybe you want to print stylized book covers, the free PBS Great American Read travel-inspired posters, free digital downloads from Amplifier art, author posters, posters from your favorite Etsy or TPT designer, or something of your own creation.  Classroom Printer and Ink While the school photocopier is perfect for everyday handouts, a color printer or your own is a huge asset for all. The. Rest. Gameboards, escape room elements, station signs, bulletin board pieces, library signs, and everything else.  Plants While I’ve never had a green thumb, I’ve learned over the years that bringing nature into a space actually boosts productivity and health while providing a sense of calm. Your budget might give you the perfect opportunity to hang some plants by your windows or add a plant stand in the library corner.  Books If you’re struggling with restrictions on your library, a budget might allow you for more controlled choice when you order novel-in-verse or graphic-novel book club selections. If you’re happily located in a state where reading is still unrestricted - I hate that I’m even having to write this - then your budget is a wonderful opportunity to shore up your library shelves with new titles your students are drawn to. Maybe your copy of Long Way Down never came back last year, so you buy three more. Or you go ahead and dive in with the whole Heartstopper series. Whatever works in your library, budget gives you the chance to go for it. Art Supplies If you like integrating sketchnotes, one-pagers, open-mind activities, and similar forms that combine visual and written communication, having a stock of art materials you can pull out at the right moment will be a major asset.  Of course, there are a million ways you might spend your teacher budget, and you know your classroom best! But if you’re looking for ideas, this week I recommend you consider the big five of posters, printing, plants, books, and art supplies as stellar options.    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!

Today I’d like to share one of my favorite episodes from the Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast archives. In this special episode, I invited five creative guests to give their take on impactful classroom design. This back-to-school season felt like the perfect time to share it again. I’ll be back with a full episode on Thursday, but at the moment I’m in the throes of a 6,000 mile move with my two kids and our cat, and my office is basically a giant pile of boxes. So please forgive the change in routine, but I think you’re going to love this wonderful episode! See the full blog post with all the links: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/2021/07/130-build-connection-with-your-classroom-design.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 just have a very quick idea for you and it’s this. As back-to-school hits, it’s easy to immediately become isolated in your classroom. You’ve got a million to-dos for your space and your students. But the school year is going to feel better if you feel connected to the teacher across the hall, the teacher next door, and the teacher upstairs. Know what I mean? So this week I want to recommend that you host your department for something this back-to-school season. And I’m going to give you a few quick ideas for what that something might be, though really, the what doesn’t matter nearly as much as the why.  One super simple way to get the department together would be to suggest a lunch potluck in your classroom during the return week. Just send a nice email out saying you’d love to catch up with everyone and you’ll be there with some kind of shareable food. Invite everyone to come, bringing their own shareable food. Emphasize that a veggie tray or chips and dip are just fine - no need for anyone to spend hours making homemade strawberry rhubarb pie unless they WANT to. (That would be me, I would want to). Feel free not to even bring up work at this little lunch bash, just welcome the new folks and chat with the returners and generally take a second to remember that you’re going into fall as part of a team.  Another easy option would be to suggest an ice cream or Boba or even afternoon tea after work outing, following up on one of the teacher workdays. Again, very little prep needs to be involved as the “host.” Simply choose a venue and send out an invitation. If you want to use a fun Canva template for your invites, so much the better, but there’s no need to spend more than five minutes on it when you’re already busy.  Last but not least, a third option is to invite your colleagues to a pedagogy breakfast. Now, you may laugh, but I’ve actually done this quite a few times, and it was fun. In this case, either choose a coffee shop or bakery near your school and invite your department to gather there in the morning before work for half an hour. You could invite everyone to share an idea they’re excited about that they found over the summer, something that worked well the year before, or something around a particular theme on everyone’s mind, like AI in the classroom or how they’re promoting choice reading.  Of course, there are dozens of other ways you could get together for some no-fuss department bonding. Bowling? After-work swim at the lake? Happy hour? My goal today is just to say that as you turn your attention toward building community and connection with your students this fall, you might also want to think about some easy ways to do it with the adults you work with. Feeling like part of a team, maybe one that shares fond memories of the oatmeal-raisin scones down the road or the time Diana rolled three strikes in a row to defeat Shonda, will only help you feel safer and more supported at work. Maybe your decision to host a no-fuss gathering now will also lead others to sprinkle in team gatherings of their own throughout the year.   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!