First Chapter Friday: Nancy Tandon Reads
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
1d ago
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 debut middle grade novel, The Way I Say It (Charlesbridge, 2022) was an American Booksellers Assoc ..read more
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272: You Need to Know about this Short Story
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
5d ago
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, and the World Fantasy Award? It can bring a new genre to your short story unit, add a layer to a sc ..read more
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271: #Bookface is Well Worth a Look
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
1w ago
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 reason it keeps on resurfacing. It's amazing! So in this quick episode, let's dive into what Bookface i ..read more
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270: Try a March Madness Poetry Bracket
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash: ELA
1w ago
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. Then you fill it in with poetry that you love. You can mix together classic poetry, performance ..read more
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269: Teaching Research to Digital Natives
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
2w ago
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 they also cited Ted Talks, telephone calls, online articles, online compendiums, and more. Their in ..read more
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268: Highly Recommended: These Google Translate Tools
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
2w ago
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 Street Signs, parking signs, parking tickets, frozen pizza cooking instructions, directions for u ..read more
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267: So your Students aren't Doing the Reading? Here's Help.
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
3w ago
  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 aren’t reading and lessons aren’t working, you’ll find some helpful possibilities for shi ..read more
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266: Highly Recommended: The Smoothie Grant (Summer PD Ideas)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
3w ago
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 “smoothie grant.” One summer, my school had money left from its PD budget, and invited teachers ..read more
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265: Teaching Conversation in a Polarized World (The Elective Series Begins)
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
1M ago
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 parts of other people’s electives, within your current courses. I’ll be interviewing teachers about ..read more
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264: Highly Recommended: Launch Tiny Podcasts
The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | Education
by Betsy Potash | ELA
1M ago
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 project connecting the English and History curriculum for the students’ honors Humanities por ..read more
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