357: Your Writer's Craft Tournament

Lately, I’ve been working on gamification. Not the kind where you get points and add custom outfits to your hamster avatar when you advance through a lesson - though don’t get me wrong, that seems cool - more the kind where learning takes place through an actual game structure. We’re big fans of games at my house - Catan, Parcheesi, Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza, Wordle, Uno, Apple to Apples - and so I’ve had a lot of fun brainstorming ideas. But today I was zeroing in on brackets. You know, tournament brackets. Like at March Madness time, or at weekend pickleball tournaments. I’ve seen lots of folks try March Madness brackets with poetry, which I love, but I was brainstorming out at the edges of that idea today. What else could we bracket?  So here’s my last quick idea for you as we all swirl into the break tornado and leave work behind for a while. What if we held a bracket for writer’s craft moves?  Imagine it. Sensory details vs. Personification. Symbolism vs. simile. Appositives vs. strikingly short sentences. The semicolon vs. the dash. Which is more useful?  Which paves the way to a great line and why? Where have students seen the move in action and was it truly powerful? How can they use it in their writing and just how handy is it? When you’re doing the faceoff, you could have students partner up and search for examples to share, or write examples to read aloud as part of the discussion of the merits of each side.  Can you imagine debating which deserves to move forward, symbolism or simile, and then voting for one to advance in the tournament WITHOUT generating a pretty strong understanding of what it is and how to use it? And can you imagine how fun it would be to see students get fired up over the dash being better than the semicolon? Or are the parentheses crushing the ellipses?  Yeah, I just had to tell you about this idea. Even though I know  you don’t have time to use it just at the moment, it was too exciting for me to hold off until next year. I can’t wait to hear about your writer’s craft tournament in 2025. You can reach me, as always, at betsy@nowsparkcreativity.com with your fabulous stories.   Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Grab the free Better Discussions toolkit 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!