A new school year is upon us!
One of my favorite things to do each year is set up my classroom. I love seeing the change from boring old grey, sad space to bright, colorful learning environment!Here are my 'before' pictures:
One of the challenges with this classroom is that is pretty small for 24 students. So I have to get creative with how I organize the desks and other furniture. I do not believe that students learn best in rows, so my class is always set up in table groups. But with this space, I've split some of my table groups into what we call workstations. These are 2-desk table groups scattered around the edges of the room.
I use modified flexible seating in my class.
This means that I don't assign seats, and students are free to move around to where they learn best. Some kids know that they do better with less distractions at one of the workstations. I also have a bunch of light stools that can be moved from place to place as we need them. I picked these up from Walmart and they were only 80 pesos (about 4 dollars) a piece.
Word of Warning: I have had dads come in and try to sit on these stools and totally fall off! I don't think they are really built for adults...
Another one of my beliefs that features prominently in my classroom space, is that we should be learning in a cheerfull, pleasant environment.
Our classroom should be somewhere we want to be!
I try to make the room bright and include touches to make it feel more home-y and less institutionalized. In order to make the room brighter, I hit up The Dollar Tree when I'm visiting the states in the summer, and when I'm back in Mexico, I go to Waldo's.
This year, I hit up the party section and got a whole bunch of those tissue paper balls and flowers. I also picked up some bright fabric storage boxes and some plastic buckets for table supplies.
These are cheap and useful ways to bring some color (and storage) into the room and you would not believe the difference it makes!
Another of my favorite ways to make the room feel good, is by bringing in some life! I really CAN NOT handle a class pet, so plants it is!
This year I got one pothos or spider plant for each table group. I figured those were pretty hardy plants that could survive occasional bouts of forgetting to water them... The kids love them and occasionally I find one of them gently stroking the leaves as they work.
I also created a little "zen area" for myself on the corver of my desk. I included a tiny succulent, a little cactus lamp I made last year, and the oil diffuser. My classroom is always warm and I found that it can get quite stinky after recess. A few drops of peppermint in the diffuser and the room becomes pleasant-to-the-sniff once again!
Now, let me give you a quick tour of the different areas of the room! Starting with our front door...
Every year, I print out a life size picture of me using the cringily-named website Rasterbator.net. This free website is amazing! You can upload any image and decide how big you want it to be, the website then splits the image over multiple pages and you can print it out of your normal printer and then glue it together to make a poster sized image! I change up my speeck bubble message every few weeks.
Then we move on to...
And there we are! A beautiful, welcoming, bright classroom!
