NO MORE STARTING FROM SCRATCH
Start 2025 with the Assistant You've Always Wished You Had
Maybe You're Sick of Teacher Tired...
You're balancing new preps and new roles AGAIN, and you'd really like to get out of survival mode.
Things are finally starting to feel more normal post-Covid, but it still feels like you'd have to clone yourself to get everything done day after day.
You feel guilty when work takes you away from family, AND guilty when family takes you away from work.
Ugh.
It's overwhelming trying to juggle so many full plates without any crashing.
You love teaching on the good days. You just wish there could be more of them.
You shouldn't have to prep all those preps alone.
What if you could quit reinventing the wheel in 2025 and turn to easily-adaptable, ready-made materials for hexagonal thinking, one-pagers, podcasting, argument, and more?
Wouldn't it be nice to plan for those new preps with confidence? To feel excited for the first day back?
You want creative lessons that work, help you can count on when you have no time to plan, and projects you can roll out with confidence.
You're ready to stop feeling perpetually overwhelmed.
It is possible.
Smooth the Way for your Best Year Yet
The Lighthouse for Secondary ELA Teachers
Planning a new lesson/unit/course/grade level just got a lot easier. With The Lighthouse resources at your fingertips, you'll never have to start over again.
Here's the Method already Helping Hundreds of Teachers like You
Over 2000 Happy Members since 2020
When Planning Time gets Cut Short...
Discover Curriculum Across 30+ Themes like These
If you've been finding and adapting material and creating it from scratch for years without help, get ready for relief. Add new creative elements to your programs without making your life more complicated, when you tailor your choice of customizable curriculum to suit your needs.
Want to Zoom in? Imagine Teaching Annotation Like This.
Give The Lighthouse five minutes of download time, and it'll give you resources like these!
Imagine Introducing Poetry like this.
The pop-up poetry workshops, poetry bracket, and contemporary poet spotlights are waiting!
Imagine these Hexagonal Thinking Options
A rainbow of options for novels, Shakespeare, argument, vocabulary, and more.
Are you Starting to Visualize It?
Let's Get Your Teacher Mojo Back
Not so long ago, I was in the classroom, rolling out poetry slams, choice reading units, book clubs, silent discussions, and performance workshops. I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't, and I've learned even more since working full time with teachers around the country.
Think of me as a curriculum designer on your team. The kind that smiles, notices what you're doing well, and brings the chai latte with cinnamon. I've helped thousands of teachers find more balance and creativity in the classroom through my membership over the last four years. We can do this together.
Take the Tour
👇🏾👇👇🏽 Imagine all this at your Fingertips. 👇🏾👇👇🏽
👆🏻👆🏽☝🏿 Step inside the membership with this deep dive tour. 👆🏻👆🏽☝🏿
Planning doesn't have to be exhausting and expensive.
Teachers Say They've Finally Found Help
Trade Hours of Planning for Minutes of Downloading
$900 Value Creative Curriculum
Discover quick activities, full lessons, and longer projects and units across a wide range of themes.
$300 Value Anytime Tools
Need syllabus templates? Displays? Attendance questions to build community? Seasonal lessons near school holidays? The Anytime Tools, Seasonal Content, and Classroom Spaces sections are waiting!
Priceless Community to Support You
If you want to join us, our Facebook community is full of creative teachers with similar priorities, a desire to share the journey, and so much creativity.
Don't Spend Winter Break Stressing.
Let's plan 2025 TOGETHER. You, me, and a creative community of hundreds of other like-minded educators around the world.
It is possible. With so many customizable activities, projects, and units waiting in The Lighthouse, your work bag doesn't have to follow you everywhere like a shadow.
I know you want to give your students what they deserve, and spend the time with family that you deserve. Inside the membership, you'll find the materials and methods that can save you hours and days of planning this summer, and all year long.
It's Time for Life to Feel Manageable Again. Even Joyful.
Your kids might be shocked when you've got the energy to make pizza with them and laugh out loud during "Is it Cake?"
You may find yourself humming "Me" instead of "I Can Do it with a Broken Heart" on your way in from the parking lot.
Your team may wonder how you're launching a poetry slam and hosting a literary food truck festival without staying late.
It's time to enjoy some good surprises for a change.
Wondering About Your Standards?
Discover help for planning creatively AND meeting your requirements throughout the year, including our much-requested color-coded standards checklists.
See how podcasting, hexagonal thinking, documentary projects, argument stations, and other creative options can help you teach your objectives.
Inside our Planning and Productivity materials, you'll also find an ideal week planner to help you maximize your week so you stay true to YOUR priorities.
BONUSES THAT GO BEYOND THE EXPECTED
The Sub Plan Library, Anytime Tools, and Guest Expert Workshops
When you need to miss work, use this sub plan library to take that frantic stress out of the situation. You should get to play a game with your sick child, binge watch
Bridgerton, or go back to sleep, not lesson plan.
These workshops allow you to learn new skills when you want to from leaders in our field like
Penny Kittle, Angela Stockman, Sylvia Duckworth, and John Spencer.
The Anytime Tools feature helpful options to tap into at any time, like the growing grammar program, the plagiarism and citation lesson, the early finisher's choice boards for
middle and high school, and the Ed Deck + Expansion Pack.
New in the Lighthouse: AI in ELA
Find resources on the hot topic in education, with guest expert help on prompt engineering for students from Dr. John Spencer and time-saving options from productivity guru Angela Watson.
Janel brought her entire district into The Lighthouse, and they're in the middle of their third year.
What's It Like to Work with Betsy?
Real Results from Real Teachers
Worried about Overwhelm?
The Lighthouse has been carefully designed to provide you with what you want, when you want it. Check out the overwhelm-preventing features below!
MONDAY
EMAILS
Each week, I'll send you an email letting you know what's new or seasonally useful in The Lighthouse.
By setting aside ten minutes on Mondays to see what's new and relevant to you, you can make intentional use
of all the time-saving resources inside The Lighthouse.
THE
PATHWAYS
The Pathways allow you to access helpful Lighthouse content based on your situation.
You might choose a pathway to help your writers improve, start a new position, amp your engagement, plan during the summer, tackle a whole class novel, etc.
QUICK
WINS
Every month when you open The Lighthouse, you'll see links to quick wins that will be especially helpful for the time of year.
These might include seasonal displays or activities, helpful new resources I don't want you to miss, or popular units or
projects.
EASY ORGANIZATION
The Lighthouse is carefully organized for easy navigation.
You can look up curriculum areas through the alphabetical themes dropdown, use the search tool to find curriculum for whatever you're tackling next, or choose a pathway to guide you with a specific situation.
The Pathways Provide Clear Steps for your Situation
Start with the whole class novel pathway, or the Amp your Engagement pathway.
Explore others whenever you're ready.
Grab a Sneak Peek at the Pathways Now
They'll help to make your creative ideas about teaching and learning possible.
The engagement pathway is filled with popular projects and programs to help students reengage.
The writing pathway hosts activities, units, and projects to help your
writers level up.
The new position pathway is here to help you plan for a new course or job over the summer.
A Few As for Your Qs
Still wondering about something? Let me help!
Think of Netflix. You pay a fee to access Schitt’s Creek and Bakeoff on the regular. You can cancel when you want to.
That’s how The Lighthouse works too.
Once you join, you have full access to alllll the curriculum, sub plans, bonuses, and community.
Along the way, you’re free to load up your Google drive with every project, one-pager, poetry workshop, poster, and writing prompt that you love. You can watch every workshop, view every tech tutorial, print your Ed deck, and give your classroom displays a makeover.
When you choose to cancel, you cancel, and you no longer have access. There’s a short guide inside The Lighthouse that shows you how to make changes to your account. It’s easy.
Plus, I’m always an email away to help out.
To be honest, I’m just so excited for you to step inside and start getting the help I want you to have for the mountain of teaching challenges you’ve been facing.
I don’t want fear to hold you back, and that’s where the 30 day refund policy comes in.
You don’t have to prove anything to me if it turns out The Lighthouse isn’t for you. Just shoot me an email in the first 30 days and I’ll send you a refund.
Almost no one has ever taken me up on the offer, but if you do, you won’t hurt my feelings! You’ll just get your money back.
Inside the membership you'll find tips and strategies delivered through text, videos, and links to podcasts and blog posts. The curriculum is generally offered in the Google Slides version, which you can always download as a Powerpoint or PDF. You can then move and convert things as you wish to work with your own LMS.
Of course! That's what our community on Facebook is for. I'll be hanging out in there on the regular to answer questions, celebrate wins, and help ignite creative brainstorming. Sometimes I'll answer your questions, sometimes other community members will. We can all learn so much from each other.
Hey, I’ve got nothing against TPT. Just last month I bought my children the coolest drawing pages there for our trip to Budapest. And it kept them happy and busy coloring panda bears for forty-five minutes.
But when it comes down to it, TPT is like a first aid kit. You can grab an ace bandage here, a glow-in-the-dark Batman bandaid there. It can save you for a moment, when you just really need something for tomorrow.
But what about the next tomorrow? And the next?
Cobbling together resources with different approaches and styles can get old fast, and it always leaves you looking.
With The Lighthouse, you know what you have and where to find it. You’ve got a community to talk the materials over with, and a guide (hi, that’s me!) to support you as you integrate the new materials you love with the courses you’ve lovingly designed.
This is such an important question. Because you have to choose to let me help. And that does mean setting aside at least a half an hour or so each month to go in and see what I’ve created for you. Together with the creative members inside, I’ve come up with a system that works well.
Each month, I share all the new topic content from day one. So all the curriculum, video tutorials, posters, explanations, and links are waiting for anyone who wants to dive in, binge through it all, and immediately put it to use in class.
But for those who like to go bit by bit, I send an email every Monday guiding you to peruse and make use of a small chunk of what’s there. Then in our Facebook group, I invite conversation, show examples, and offer challenges to help you dive deeper into our theme.
In the end, you could make full use of the materials by devoting just one planning period a month to scan and schedule them all. Or you could share the journey with the other members, taking it slower and talking it through with your community.
Here’s the bottom line. I’ve spent thousands of hours creating the materials inside The Lighthouse for you, and that is all time you can save. Not a bad trade for the time it takes you to click download.
The curriculum inside The Lighthouse is adaptable, editable, and flexible for middle and high school ELA teachers teaching at different levels across the country and the world.
Each theme has so many different resources, which lets you use YOUR creativity to integrate what you love and skip what’s not right for your students. With hundreds of resources to choose from, you’ll use your intuition and experience to tell you what will be the best fit for your kiddos.
One teacher might start the year by using the poetry terms bellringers to help their 9th graders review before diving into the performance poetry kit, the digital writing makerspace to help their eleventh graders with narrative, and the First Chapter Friday bulletin board to launch their choice reading program with a bang.
Another might lead off seventh grade English with identity hexagons, the icebreaker set, and the full PBL podcasting unit.
A third might open with six word memoirs and short story stations, then move into genius hour while reading their first class novel.
The Lighthouse is not a scripted curriculum (ew). It’s more like having a curriculum designer on your team. YOUR team. The Lighthouse doesn’t replace your creativity and vision for your classroom, it helps bring it to life.
When you’re ready to plan a new unit, you stroll down the digital aisles (hang a left at the Shakespeare posters and swing past modern mentor texts if you’re looking for that Poe escape room!). You find what you want, edit it if you wish, and roll it out when you’re ready.
Every single new member will have full and immediate access to everything in The Lighthouse.
You’ll see colorful, creative, varied curriculum you can adapt and use immediately under 30 different topics (one-pagers, podcasting, choice reading, creative annotation, literature circles, poetry, short stories, vocabulary, escape rooms, and so much more). Clear pathways will help you tackle big topics like improving engagement, building writing skills, and summer planning.
You’ll see an extensive library of sub plans waiting to take the pressure off you when you need a day cuddled up in bed to reread Anne of Green Gables and eat chicken noodle soup.
You’ll see anytime tools like digital planner pages and editable syllabus templates to help you get organized, back-to-school stations and icebreakers, posters and displays for your walls, and even video workshops from the likes of Penny Kittle and Sylvia Duckworth.
You’ll be welcomed into our approachable and private Facebook group where you can ask questions, share your wins, and get help when tricky situations arise at your school.
Ready to Start Strolling the Digital Aisles?
Questions?
Click the icon in the bottom right to send a question directly to me.
betsy@nowsparkcreativity.com
@nowsparkcreativity
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