239: Highly Recommended: Use One-Pagers as a Creative Gateway

This week I want to talk about how one-pagers can be a powerful gateway to creative options in your classroom.  Let’s start with the one-pager basics. A one-pager allows students to express their takeaways from, well, just about anything, on a single paper through a combination of words and images. A one-pager can includes quotations, analysis, key terms, imagery, special fonts, symbolic colors, and more. You probably already know that my #1 tip for one-pagers is to give students a template that connects the elements that you want with a location on a template, so kids don’t feel overwhelmed as they begin to experiment.  You can try your first one-pager with a novel, a Ted talk, a poem, a short story, a play, a song, a podcast... You get the idea!  One of the great things about one-pagers is that they open the door to this form of dual expression, where kids are communicating their ideas through both words and visuals. Take a second to talk to them about how prevalent this is in the world. Ask them to consider political campaigns, social media, Youtube, online news. Get them started thinking about how often they see only words or only pictures, and how often it’s actually a combination that expresses ideas most effectively and memorably.  As students realize that their simple first step of a one-pager is actually guiding them into a new genre of expression, one that parallels many forms of real world communication, they may open up to more type of creative projects in class. You may find them more excited about research carousels, infographics, book trailers, and more real-world projects that bring visuals onto the scene to complement their writing. You may find that fewer students scoff that art is a waste of their time.  If you haven’t tried a one-pager yet, this week I want to highly recommend that you dive in! I’ll link my free templates for any novel in the show notes. And if you have, give a little thought to how you can use them as a gateway in students’ minds. It’s a powerful shift in how we see the world, and one that can benefit your creative classroom.  Free One-Pager Templates Here Black Friday Menu for Next Week Starting Monday (Each Button Goes Live on its Day of the Week) 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!   

Om Podcasten

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!