Spark Creativity

One-pagers combine drawings with text to make ideas come alive in students’ minds and memories. They're a perfect option for a quick and creative one-pager template and assessment with whole-class novels, literature circles, or choice reading. Don't worry—there's a rubric so you can grade your one-pagers quickly and get home early for dinner. But what about your art-haters? The ones who scoff at anything involving colored pencils? I've had plenty of those too. That's why I've designed specific

Start your school year strong with these easy-to-use Name Tent One-Pagers — the perfect first day activity for building classroom community and learning student names! Learning students’ names has always been tricky for me. I used to get so nervous during the first two weeks, afraid I would make simple mistakes and risk disengaging the very students I wanted to connect with. That's why I started using printed name tents — and it changed everything! I even took it a step further: snapping a qui

Kick off the first day of school with this fun and creative One-Pager Icebreaker! Perfect for introducing students to the one-pager method, this activity allows them to express themselves while helping you and their classmates learn more about them. Ideal for first day activities or as part of an identity unit, this "All About Me" one-pager activity comes with simple, step-by-step instructions and three different templates to guide students in creating personalized, visually engaging pages.

Help students think beyond the careers they already know with this career exploration project and set of creative career activities. Designed to inspire curiosity about future possibilities, this two-week unit guides students through hands-on, reflective, and research-based tasks that encourage them to consider a wide range of career paths and personal goals. Each activity is designed to build real-world awareness, critical thinking, and presentation skills. Whether students are completing a

Looking for an engaging way to practice writing arguments? Love one-pagers? Try this Argument One-Pager Activity — a creative and structured way for students to organize their thinking! This fun twist on a traditional argument paper makes a perfect finale for any literature unit, or you can use it as a pre-writing graphic organizer to help students get clear on their theses, quotations, main points, and big ideas before drafting. The best part? This writing arguments graphic organizer gives ev

This fun literary food truck project is an engaging final assessment for literature circles/book clubs, choice reading, and even class novels. Get ready for a mouth-watering and colorful day of critical thinking when the literary food truck festival arrives in your classroom. Check out the literary food truck photo tour right here! If you and your students are a bit tired of writing (and grading) essays, and you could use a chance to think deeply in a brand new (STEAM-y) way, this project is f

Argument writing practice can get old fast when the format is always the same. But repetition helps so much in getting students to understand how to write literary analysis. So what to do?You want your students to know how to make points, give evidence, and analyze that evidence, but you're sick of the groans when you roll out your newest essay assignment. Students focus on issues like word count and number of quotations instead of becoming better writers, and they barely engage with the feedb

Ted Talks are an amazing resource for the classroom, but it can be tricky to keep students focused throughout a talk. Having a creative one-pager activity to complete as they watch can help so much. This guided Ted Talk one-pager asks students to pull key information as they listen, curating, responding, and highlighting meaning as they absorb the Ted Talk. Happy Teachers are Saying:"Quick and easy. Great for "Lame Duck" days!" "I do TED Fridays and this will make engagement skyrocket!" "I lov

The Outsiders is an incredible book for engaging students. And this complete novel study will make it easy. This complete curriculum for The Outsiders will keep your stress low and your students happily and creatively engaged. You'll be spoiled for choice as you approach each day of your unit, mixing and matching the discussion questions, interdisciplinary activities and creative assessments you like the best. What's Inside: ✓ Chapter Guides ✓ Creative Assessments ✓ 18 Creative Activities

Studying Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech gives a wonderful opportunity for students to make connections between the civil rights movement and their own lives and the movements happening around them today. For this one-pager activity, students are guided to use one of the three provided templates and put down not only their top takeaways from the speech, but also their reflections and connections through words and imagery. Whether you're showing a video of the speech, playing the aud

These fifteen writing mini-lessons with practice prompts can help every secondary student writer improve. When you use this print-and-go set, whether as a writer's notebook, a set of bellringers, writing station work, or review, you'll be helping each of your writers advance across disciplines and across different types of assignments. From the Reviews: "This is AMAZEBALLS great! Not only are there clear examples comparing the 'before' and 'after' application of the lesson, but there are also

This podcast one-pager can help you turn disengaged listeners staring off toward space into focused critical thinkers. Just queue up the podcast of your choice (Serial? How I Built This? Smash Boom Best? Mars Patel?) and let students jot down their takeaways as they listen. Happy Teachers are Saying: "I love these! They make things so simple!""My students love your one-pagers - they allow them to express themselves creatively!""I used this with my media class, and the students loved doing somet

Infographics are a powerful combination of research, writing, and visuals. They represent the kind of multi-medium work that goes on in the real world using ELA skills all the time. Students see infographics everywhere, on social media, in magazines, and on websites. If you wish your students would care more about research and editing, this project can help. It takes a design thinking approach to infographics, first guiding students to brainstorm issues they care about, then considering wha

Teaching argumentative writing can be challenging when your students are at different skill levels. Some leave their quotations hanging without analysis, while others are already ready to tackle counterarguments and bring their voice into their writing. So, how can you bridge this gap? With the Argumentative Writing Unit: Engaging Argumentative Writing Prompts and Graphic Organizer for Middle and High School, you’ll have all the tools you need to meet your students where they are. Whether the

Strengthen your students’ argument writing with this engaging hexagonal thinking graphic organizer. Designed to help middle and high school students brainstorm, organize, and connect ideas before drafting an argument essay, this resource encourages deeper thinking through interactive prewriting. Using hexagonal thinking as a prewriting strategy, students visually explore how their claims, evidence, counterarguments, and thesis statements relate to one another. It’s an excellent way to scaff

HOLIDAY WRITING FREEBIE! I hope this helps take some stress out of your holiday season. Holiday creative writing projects help keep students (and teachers) going during the busy month of December. If you want happy, engaged students in the build up to winter break, this engaging unit can help. I was inspired by the amazing book Make Writing, by Angela Stockman, to create a series of ELA maker space projects. First, students make something using art or maker materials. Then, they write about it

Someday, their pandemic journal will allow students to share this moment in time with their children and grandchildren. Today, making it will help them to process their experience and reflect on their days. This one-pager template, available as a PDF or a Google Drive link, gives students an easy way to collage together memories and feelings from their days. Whether they're illuminating a meaningful quotation, writing a story of how they helped someone, documenting top headlines of the day, or

Help your students connect with Shakespeare through this fun podcasting listening activity. Invite students to listen to all four of these episodes of the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast or to choose one or two. Each episode connects Shakespeare to some aspect of modern culture, like Star Wars, YA Novels, Hip Hop, or Pop music. Students can connect to the podcasts through the QR codes if they want to listen on the go, or through the links on the Google drive version. If you wish, use one of the

Vision boards can help students think about the future in a positive way, reflecting and setting goals as they consider who they want to be and how to get there. In this reflective project, students consider the possibility of this pandemic as a pivot point in their lives from which they can take what they've learned about themselves and their dreams during this time at home and move forward courageously. You can either send out the student instructions by PDF and let students craft vision boa

Maybe you had a big research project planned, but you're quickly realizing now is not the time. Simpler is better when you're collaborating with your students from far away. Using this digital learning set, your students will choose research topics related to corona virus and create infographics to help people in their communities understand and respond better to the virus. In the Google drive file, you'll find handouts to guide students in finding infographic inspiration on the web, designing