238: Let me Plan your ELA Lessons the Week before Thanksgiving
11/14/23 • 11 min
The week before Thanksgiving it's easy to feel a little scattered! For teachers AND students. It can be nice to take a break from your main unit and focus on some activities that still promote ELA skills but give kids something freshly engaging to focus on.
Since I imagine your attention is a bit divided at the moment between lesson planning, menu planning, and maybe even packing lists, I'd like to give you three day's worth of activities that you can plug and play next week to take the pressure off yourself.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
Preview the fun Black Friday week deals (including The Lighthouse $1 trial) here.
Free Native American Heritage Month Display: You can grab it here.
You can make your copy of the guided gratitude journal and thank you notes here.
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 week before Thanksgiving it's easy to feel a little scattered! For teachers AND students. It can be nice to take a break from your main unit and focus on some activities that still promote ELA skills but give kids something freshly engaging to focus on.
Since I imagine your attention is a bit divided at the moment between lesson planning, menu planning, and maybe even packing lists, I'd like to give you three day's worth of activities that you can plug and play next week to take the pressure off yourself.
Links Mentioned in the Show:
Preview the fun Black Friday week deals (including The Lighthouse $1 trial) here.
Free Native American Heritage Month Display: You can grab it here.
You can make your copy of the guided gratitude journal and thank you notes here.
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!
Previous Episode
237: Highly Recommended: Don't Grade it All
This week I want to share advice I only wish someone had given me long ago - don’t grade everything your students create in class.
It’s easy to feel pressure to put a grade on everything students make. They often come in expecting to see a letter on top of every single piece of paper they create for you.
But ew. It’s impossible to keep up, and it doesn’t necessarily benefit them for you to try.
Instead, think about how you can grade what really shows what they’ve learned, and build in ways to validate their effort on other things.
Maybe you do 5 bellringers a week, and the grading load is crushing you. Try walking around with a stamp and stamping them as students complete them. They see that you’re noticing their work, and you can give them a completion grade for the week, taking off for kids who repeatedly DON’T do the work. Or you could invite students to choose their favorite on Friday that really shows their mastery and effort, and turn that one in for you to see.
Let’s look at another scenario. Your students are working on their argument writing, and you’re planning to do a series of five prompts with them. Think about how you can build in self-editing stations (with tips from you build into the stations), peer editing, and revision practice focused on specific skills you know they need to work on throughout the unit. Then invite them to turn in a final draft of just one of the prompts for you to grade.
I could go on and on with examples, but the main thing is to remember: you don’t have to grade it all. Use stickers, stamps, check marks, peer feedback, and selected pieces to turn in for grading to validate your students effort, and save your grading time for what really counts. I highly recommend you give yourself permission to stop grading everything, and see how much creative planning time you can get back into your day!
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!
Next Episode
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.
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!
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