355: When All Else Fails

This week I’m thinking about those moments when the system collapses. Your toddler wakes up at 3 am and stays awake until 7. Your careful planning for a poetry slam explodes when you feel a sore throat lurking the day before and you get one of those icky awful chills on your way out to the parking lot. Your partner has to work overtime when you were counting on him to do dinner and bedtime while you graded 100 papers and prepped the next day. Today’s one of those days for me, with my partner on an international work trip with his students as what everyone is guessing is norovirus has hit our community and my household. Just before my daughter’s winter concert, my elaborately planned community cookie exchange, and my son’s golden birthday. As we say in Minnesota, uff-da.  So without further ado, I want to share three free resources I’ve created for you that you can use at times like this, when all else fails. Don’t worry, I’ll drop links to grab them all in the show notes.  First of all, my old faithful, now in use in over 10,000 classrooms. The one-pager templates. You can bust these out and modify them to suit pretty much whatever you’re reading. The specific directions guide students in how to represent the text through imagery, quotations, and analysis on the template, taking away that fear of the blank page. A little creative constraint paves the way for students to share their top takeaways and make connections beyond the page, giving even your art-wariest students a chance to succeed with this colorful, creative, reading reflection.  Next, there’s the Book Face challenge. This fun activity will promote your reading culture, and all you need are books. Have you seen the #bookface flood on Instagram in recent years? The idea is simple. You find a book with a picture of a face on it, then find a way to recreate the scenery featured on the cover and take a picture of the cover with the face in the book shown over your (or your partner’s face) so it seems like the book is actually part of the photo. It’s so hard to describe, but so cool to see! I created a bunch of examples and a quick guide so your students can easily try it. If you’re having a ridiculously stressful week, a day setting up fun #bookface photos with your students and then showcasing them in a big display can help. At least a little.  Finally, there’s blackout poetry. If you haven’t tried this yet, take this as your sign. Download the free guide, put some old books in a corner of your classroom, and keep this activity handy for the next time all else fails. For blackout poetry, students choose words on an exciting page to arrange into a poem, then doodle around the words and black out everything but the doodle and the chosen words. OK, that’s a bit of an oversimplification but that’s why I made you the GUIDE. This project has a history of turning out amazing, and you can make it go with anything. You invite students to create a blackout poem that connects with a theme from your reading, an essential question from your unit, or just let them float free with their topics. OK, my friend. Time to go deal with the fact that there’s a lot to deal with. I know you know, and I hope one of these activities can help the next time you’re doing the same. Remember, I’m going to link to all these free downloads in the show notes, and I’m ALSO going to link to a fun recent collab I did with 9 other creative curriculum designers to showcase emergency sub plans. If you grab these three and a bunch of those too, you’ll have a dozen or so options ready the next time all else fails.    Links Mentioned: Pick up the free one-pager templates: https://nowsparkcreativity.com/ready-for-one-pager-success  Grab the free Bookface Activity: https://sparkcreativity.kartra.com/page/bookface Get the free Blackout poetry guide: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Blackout-Poetry-Activity-l-black-out-poetry-l-blackout-poetry-passages-4165682 Go further with 10 more emergency sub plans: https://buildingbooklove.com/ela-emergency-sub-plans-for-middle-school-and-high-school-english/    Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Snag three free weeks of community-building attendance question slides 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!