166: How to Add an Audiobook Listening Station to your ELA Classroom

Want to help the independent readers in your ELA classroom enjoy audiobooks? Whether you want to use Audible, Libro FM (do you know about their free educator advance listening program?), Libby, or Sora, in this episode I'll walk you through the process of creating easy access for your students at your own classroom listening station. The bookstores of Bratislava, where I live now, are quite dazzling. In one, an entire wall is made of the open pages of books. A moving portrait – Harry Potter style – sits in the center, occasionally turning its head to watch you read on the pillows below. There’s a cozy book nook in one that sits in the center of an enormous circular bookcase – you actually get to read inside a nest of books. I’ve walked into a bookstore filled with fluttering book page mobiles hanging from the ceiling, and I’ve walked into a bookstore with an enormous white tree, apparently made of modge podge and pages, holding up the ceiling of the children’s section. I love it all. And today I want to share an idea I got from one such inspiring Slovak bookstore. In my favorite one, Martinus – where I sometimes go to drink chai latte and write curriculum for you – there’s a large green velvet chair in a little corner. Above it hang fifty or so fluttering bookmarks, and beside it there’s an ipad waiting for passersby to plug in their headphones or connect their airpods. On the screen? A couple dozen audiobooks, always ready for a listener. It’s an audiobook listening station, and today I want to show you how to add one to your classroom. Related episode: 141 - How to Set up your Classroom Library Go Further:  Check out the show notes at nowsparkcreativity.com for visuals and links.   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!   

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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!