The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast | ELA
Education:How To
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.
Free One-Pager Templates Here
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143: What We Can Do about Teacher Demoralization, with Doris Santoro
142: Choice Reading: Building a Reading Culture
141: Setting up your ELA Classroom Library
140: Every Student can Sketchnote, with Sylvia Duckworth
139: We Moved to Bratislava, Here's what it's Like
138: Hexagonal Thinking with Brave New Teaching (Bonus Episode)
137: Creative Activities to Pair with Any Novel
136: Creative Real-World Research Projects in ELA
135: When Students Design Escape Rooms
134: Creative Escape Rooms without the Fuss
133: Body Biographies & Digital Escape Rooms with Danielle Knight
132: A Case Study in Successful Student Podcasting
131: Help for Integrating SEL, with Dr. Lorea Martinez Perez
130: Build Connection with your Classroom Design
129: Try Hexagonal One-Pagers
128: Take your Hexagonal Thinking Activities Deeper
127: How to Create a Hexagonal Thinking Deck
126: 5 Ways to Use your Writing Makerspace
125: How to Start a Writing Makerspace
124: 6 Free Canva Tools for Teachers
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