Today I want to talk about a fantastic podcast for you to use in class if you teach Shakespeare. With dozens of intriguing episodes like "Shakespeare and Game of Thrones," "Shakespeare and YA Novels," and "Pop Sonnets," The Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast, by the Folger Shakespeare Library, is a great way to bring in modern connections and relevancy to whatever play you're studying. Today I’ll give you a quick rundown on four fun episodes, and then I hope you’ll go exploring on your own to find mo...
May 16, 2024•5 min•Ep 298•Transcript available on Metacast Choice reading can sometimes feel like an out-of-reach dream. I recently heard from a busy teacher who wrote, "I love choice reading, but squeezing it in can be tough!" Yeah, I get that. There's so much going on in ELA. In today's episode, we're talking about how to squeeze more choice reading moments into your busy schedule. Even if you don't have time to hand over 10 minutes in class for reading regularly, you can still build your choice reading program with quick-and-easy additions like these...
May 14, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today I want to talk final exams, and specifically, one I’ve really enjoyed giving when I had the leeway to skip the sit-down exam. If you don’t have to involve any Scantron sheets in your final, you might love it too, so let’s dive in. Maybe you’ve seen some of the great graduation speeches floating around the internet - maybe you even analyze some of them with your students when you’re teaching public speaking or rhetorical devices. I haven’t had time to dive in yet, but I hear good things abo...
May 09, 2024•5 min•Ep 296•Transcript available on Metacast Do your students think of the revision process as a combo of spellcheck and Grammarly? Tend to peer edit by scrawling a compliment and circling two sentences that are missing periods? Yeah, they're not alone. Honestly, I didn't really get the revision process as a student either. It sort of felt like I wrote the paper I was going to turn it in, then I'd "polish" it a little by fixing any tiny surface mistakes so I could turn it in. Students are busy people, juggling family, friends, sports, clas...
May 07, 2024•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today I want to talk about a subject I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about - how much are you willing to do for your job? And what do you do when you’ve hit your wall? I want to start by taking you to the dusty steps of the duplex I shared during my first year of teaching. It’s dusk, and I’m crying. I recently won the award for excellence in new teaching at my school, receiving many hugs and congratulations, as well as a raise and kind compliments from my head of school. I should be feeling great,...
May 02, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast With exam season coming up, you're probably looking for some creative ELA review activities. Whether your school requires that students sit a traditional exam, or you have room for something like the graduation speech final or another type of final project, it's helpful to look back over the big concepts, themes, and texts you've covered as the year draws to a close. So what options do you have besides printing out a 20 page review packet and giving students time to study it? A lot, as it turns ...
Apr 30, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, I want to highlight a useful tool Amanda Cardenas shared earlier this year on the show called The Sesame Street Quiz. It’s so versatile, so fun, and so helpful that I feel it deserves a show of its own, so here we go. Amanda has already shared with us how these work, back in episode 267. Here’s a quick review: A Sesame Street Quiz gives students four items. Three are connected and one is an outlier. For example, if you’re reading Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, you might give students the ...
Apr 25, 2024•4 min•Ep 292•Transcript available on Metacast Have you ever wished you could get students excited about genius hour, then immediately wondered what you’d do if half of them couldn’t think of a topic? Well, today on the podcast, creative teacher Melissa Moser is here to talk about one of her favorite electives to teach - Genius Hour, and exactly how she sets students up for success - even the ones who just don’t know what passion to pursue when it comes to a passion project. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I think you’re going...
Apr 23, 2024•29 min•Ep 291•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to share a fun visual trick for helping students vary their sentence structure. I never really thought about sentence length until I was writing professionally. Sure, I knew to avoid run-on sentences, how to wield a semicolon, an...
Apr 18, 2024•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Book talk podcasts can provide gentle choice reading accountability, target presentation of knowledge and speaking skills, and build a library of book recommendations for future students. Not bad, right? Today on the podcast I'm going to walk you through how to launch a book talk podcast with your students, and why it will be fantastic. Example Script: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Aj__-O8kwEJTXr_-3o7AU9B15sSQYIIFyn-cy-HSkUQ/edit?usp=sharing Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of T...
Apr 16, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, as earth day inches closer, I want to share a favorite find, Amanda Gorman’s video poem “Earthrise.” This beautiful poem could fit in so many different places in your curriculum, so let’s talk about them. First of all, let me tell you a...
Apr 11, 2024•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s never a bad thing when your classroom innovation lands you at a press conference with your state’s department of education! That’s what happened to today’s guest, Erica Kempf. She decided to try out the project-based-learning unit I designed about the ethical use of artificial intelligence, and along the way she and her students made it their own and became the go-to sources for AI in their district. They learned a lot in the process, and I’m so excited to have Erica here to share her story...
Apr 09, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to talk about a much-debated subject - when it comes to choice reading, what counts and what doesn’t? If you’ve been here with me for long, I bet you can imagine that a lot of books were involved in the early life of my own child...
Apr 04, 2024•4 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re about to dive into an elective that combines Beowulf, The Hobbit , Ursula Leguin , graphic novels, and contemporary YA! What holds all these threads together? That’s what repeat guest and creative teacher Caitlin Lore is about to tell you as we continue our series on creative electives across the country. Get ready for the big reveal in just a moment. Go Further: Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast . Join our community, Creative High School English , on Face...
Apr 02, 2024•13 min•Ep 275•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to talk about Youtube, and how we can use students’ love for it to our ELA advantage. One of my goals for this year is to create the curriculum for an elective based on Youtube. I’ve recently watched my son go through the transit...
Mar 28, 2024•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the author spotlight series at Spark Creativity. In this series, you’ll hear from authors sharing their work directly into your classroom. So sit back and listen in. Today we’re hearing from Nancy Tandon, reading from her book, The Way I Say It . Nancy has worked as an elementary school teacher, a speech-language pathologist, and an adjunct professor of Phonetics and Child Language Development, all of which helped plant seeds for stories about awesome kids doing brave things. Her debu...
Mar 26, 2024•7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for today’s edition of “Highly Recommended.” Today, let’s talk Ken Liu’s short story, “The Paper Menagerie,” one of the best I’ve ever read. “The Paper Menagerie” might also be the only scifi short story I’ve ever read. Did you know it won the Hugo award, the Nebula award,...
Mar 21, 2024•6 min•Ep 272•Transcript available on Metacast You know how we feel here at Spark Creativity about Book PR. Basically it's the best. We're all about bookish posters, displays, podcasts, guest readers, First Chapter Fridays, book trailer Tuesdays, and book tastings. If it helps kids get excited about books, we're all in! Recently I saw a lovely post over in my Creative High School English Facebook group from a teacher who hosted a Bookface competition, and it reminded me of just how much I love this idea! Bookface isn't new , but there's a re...
Mar 19, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today, let’s talk about March Madness, and how to harness all that awesome enthusiasm to get your students excited about poetry. Last year I worked with Melissa Alter Smith from #teachlivingpoets to create a March Madness bracket for The Lighthouse, and I learned a lot from her in the process! This is such a fun and easy way to bring more voices into your curriculum and help kids see a lot of different sides of poetry. You can set up your poetry bracket on your white board or on Google Slides. T...
Mar 14, 2024•5 min•Transcript available on Metacast Remember when research projects involved stacks of books and notecards? Yeah, me too. But we all know research has changed. I recently finished a couple of pedagogy books for English teachers - one by Angela Stockman on designing inclusive spaces for writers, and another by Katie Novak on Universal Design for Learning in the English classroom. And beyond the many wonderful ideas I took away from them, I was also struck by the variation in the sources they referred to. Sure, they cited texts. But...
Mar 12, 2024•10 min•Ep 269•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for today’s edition of “Highly Recommended.” This week, I want to make sure you know just how amazing the Google Translate App really is. Living here in Bratislava, and traveling around Europe with our family, we are constantly confronted by languages we don’t know. On Str...
Mar 07, 2024•3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today on the podcast, we’re sitting down with Amanda Cardenas to talk about a very big question. A huge question, really. What can teachers do when students aren’t doing the reading? And is reading out loud the majority of our texts the answer? Spoiler alert, we both can completely understand how this would seem like the answer, but in the long run, we don’t think it is. Amanda and I are going to share a lot of ideas, and I’m hopeful that if you’ve been feeling stuck in a situation where kids ar...
Mar 05, 2024•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for today’s edition of “Highly Recommended.” This week, let’s talk about some of the best summer PD options out there. First things first, I’ve got to tell you about my personal favorite summer PD experience of all time, the one my husband still jokingly refers to as my “s...
Feb 29, 2024•6 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about electives. Electives I want to design, like one about Youtube creation and one about Taylor Swift, and the amazing electives teachers in our community are designing and teaching around the world. So of course I’m really excited that today on the podcast we’ve got the first show in a new series about creative electives. My hope is that this series will bring you inspiration for new electives you can propose or new units you can teach, modeled on your favorite...
Feb 27, 2024•18 min•Ep 265•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for today’s edition of “Highly Recommended.” This week, I want to suggest you take the plunge and help your students create a tiny podcast. The first time I rolled out a podcasting project was with my tenth-grade honors students. Our humanities team had decided to create a...
Feb 22, 2024•4 min•Ep 264•Transcript available on Metacast Ahh, the hum of fluorescent lighting. The slightly stained carpeting. The copier that is almost-if-not-already-out-of-paper. The dirty coffee cups. It's no secret that at many schools, the common teacher workspace isn't exactly inviting. No one really seems to be in charge of it, no resources really seem to be allocated toward it, and no one has time to care. (If that isn't the case at your school, AWESOME! And if that's because of you, that's so cool!) But lately I can't help but ask... what if...
Feb 20, 2024•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, I want to suggest you let your students design an escape room. Escape rooms are, in the iconic words of Zoolander, so hot right now. And they have been for years. Students love them! Who wouldn’t want to learn while exploring mysterious clues and piecing together puzzles? The problem is, they take a little bit of forever to create. We’ve already talked about this quite a bit on the podcast! But you know what they say (and yes, it’s based on the research), students elevate their learni...
Feb 16, 2024•2 min•Transcript available on Metacast So you want your students to get better at something, but drill-and-kill is clearly not the answer. Been there, done that, didn't like it. So what's a creative teacher to do? Today I'm going to pull an example of a grammar skill and walk through five different ways to practice it without those groans you dread. While the skill I'm zooming in on may not be the exact one that's your focus right now, you can apply these five different strategies to pretty much anything. I'm hopeful that by the end ...
Feb 13, 2024•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, I want to share a great way to tie rhetorical analysis into the upcoming Superbowl. First things first, we know this Superbowl has a hilarious additional wrinkle, in that the world is excited to watch not only the game, but Taylor Swift attending the game. That extra detail may help more students be interested in a Superbowl-related activity this month. So let me explain this rhetorical analysis one-pager activity (by the way, link to this free resource is in the show notes). The acti...
Feb 08, 2024•3 min•Ep 260•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the second episode of the author spotlight series here at Spark Creativity! In this series, you’ll hear from authors sharing their work directly into your classroom. Today we’re hearing from Matt de la Peña reading his short story "How to Transform an Everyday, Ordinary Hoop Court into a Place of Higher Learning and You at the Podium," from the collection, Flying Lessons . Stay tuned throughout the year to hear from many more wonderful authors, including Victor Pineiro, Payal Doshi, a...
Feb 06, 2024•14 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
