Setting The Stage: Part II

Context: Last year, I was setting up the classroom on my own for the very first time. The two years prior to that I had been an associate teacher, simply following the lead of the more experienced, leading teachers in the classrooms I worked in. I learned a lot from them about what was needed, but it was a wonderful experience to finally spread my wings and try things my own way. These pictures were probably taken 2-3 days before the students actually arrived. Here's what I ended up with:

Not the greatest picture ever, but this is starting at one end of the classroom. We don't have an interactive whiteboard at our school, but every room has at least one wall that's completely covered in magnetic whiteboard material. The top right is the Vocabulary corner, where I used sentence strips to post new words we'd learned. Below it is our attendance/out of the room chart. It's a bit difficult to see, but if you were to zoom in, you could see three icons, one for 'school', one for 'home' and one for 'bathroom'. Each girl had a 'dancer' with her name on it (magnetized on back.) They knew to move the dancers anytime they went to the bathroom, and it was easy to track attendance this way. This year I think I'll add something for going to the nurse or the office. To the left of that section is our class schedule. It's on sentence strips, laminated, and color-coded (of course!) :) Green means in our classroom, blue means in another classroom and pink was for a special activity or lunch. This made the schedule super-easy to switch out at the end of each day and even modify on-the-spot if the need arose.

Magnetic tape works well for this, but the teacher who came up with this whole system (not I, not I-- sharing is caring!) convinced me that the best thing was magnetic business cards like these: Business Card Magnets because they are totally flat (unlike the magnetic tape which curls) and you can cut them to any size you like. I have found them to be super durable and have been using many of the same schedule strips for 2 years.

This picture doesn't show the full final set-up.... those two desks are the catch-all desks for the gerbil tank (and materials), the late-pass collection jar and tissues and hand sanitizer. On the inside, one was the toilet paper roll station (for the gerbils) and the other held specialty papers. Because the tissues were on that desk, the garbage can needed to be close, so it lived where that blue chair is now. Little things.

Word wall & Math Meeting Wall-- we were sure to include each girl's name on the word wall; it gives them a sense of already belonging there AND it came in handy when the girls wanted/needed to write each other letters or notes. Beneath the Math Meeting Wall is our share chart, with the "waiting to share" section, and the "already shared" section, and each student's name with a little velcro tab. We also had a spot for each day of the week, so that girls could plan out their share in advance. We tried to change over the chart every Friday.

Community rules hang in the back; that back shelving unit held all our materials for play centers including play dough, puppets, balls and blocks. Our radio lived there so that I had easy access to it while teaching. The bottom buckets on the easel held all the stuff I needed close by during morning meeting and inside the easel were markers, magnets, etc. All the goods! :) Oh! And a, small key thing: there's a tiny blue caddy atop the radiator behind the easel. That was our 'first aid' kit. Having that close by me was totally invaluable.

Blue bins=math manipulatives. Those bins eventually got labeled... but as you can see, they are at student's height or lower for easy access. On top of that was the writing center, with blue/red bins for blue/red pens, bins for their folders, and tiered organizers to keep all of our writing papers sorted. Those are fantastic and highly recommended, and were found at Lakeshore Learning. We used this shelving unit to "camouflage" our teacher desk-- can you see it? pushed away from the wall, we were able to use the wall to hang important papers... but if either of us was ever (rarely) at our desk, we could still keep an eye on everything that was happening.

Our library, my favorite part-- light blue bins for genre books, multi colored bins for leveled books. My amazing associate teacher designed each label for the bins using an index card and matching pictures from the internet :) ... On the right there are some literacy games, our listening center books, and whiteboards and other materials for our phonics program, Fundations. I used color copies of book covers and mounted them to decorate the back wall, put up some favorite books for display, and tried to keep everything very bright!

Does anyone know how to prevent big books from flapping over with all their weight? I'm hoping to figure that out because by the year's end, these books all looked very sad. That big shelf over there holds student portfolios, homework binders (which they placed there every morning and retrieved at the end of each day), and all our additional classroom materials (scissors, glue sticks, rulers, hand sanitizer, index cards, whiteboard erasers, crayons, etc...) One set of student mailboxes, which are not really visible from this picture, are in the shelf behind the big book shelf. The other set is over by the library. I initially set it up this way in order to reduce the traffic at mailboxes during unpack and pack up time.

 These hexagonal tables were already color coded, so while they're not in this picture, I had caddies to match each table, and those were the table names. I switched seats pretty regularly, so the kiddos just needed to know where they were currently sitting to follow any directions (i.e: Green table, clean up.) As you can see, there's not a ton of space and I had to be sure they wouldn't be banging into one another-- so the tables were pretty carefully arranged. The cut sentence strips above each bulletin board each indicated a different subject, but they were put up with velcro tabs, so they could be rotated, and I could show a full set of class work in the center section (the largest) in different subjects.

Okay-- this post is becoming massive, albeit helpfully reflective for me... but I'll stop here. The classroom changed a lot over the course of the year, but this was the start. Begin at the beginning. I have so many things I'm looking forward to doing differently this year (especially as I think of-- and will post about-- brain-friendly environments)... but there are some things I will cling to for dear life (like tissues at the trash can.) What are some of your non-negotiables for classroom set up?

Excited to begin,
Michelle :)