Hello all! I hope you’re all having a great start to your school year. We’ll finally be starting next week here in New York. In my county we have 2 Staff Development days Tuesday and Wednesday dealing with Common Core and the new teacher evaluation system that NY is implementing. Then on Thursday is the first day with our kids. I like having a 2-day week of actual teaching to start things off because I’m always exhausted by then!
I’ve been working very hard on my classroom this summer. I’ve always liked having a room that’s inviting and comfortable, with lots of things on the walls to spark the kids’ interest. But I’ve given much more thought to how things will work … researching classroom organization (again, Pinterest was invaluable for this) and scouring the internet for pictures of organized classrooms. Many times I found myself standing in the middle of my room and just staring around me … for minutes at a time! I’m glad no-one else was around to see me because I’m sure they would have wondered what in the world I was doing!
There are actually still a few things I want to do to get it the way I want it. I’ve spent a small fortune this summer on decor and organizational materials. But I took a few pics on Saturday to show you all what it looks like so far …
This is what you see when you walk in the door and turn right. My room is long and fairly narrow. I love the tables in my room … they have stone tops, which are great for doing labs. No worries about spills! The round table in the back is used for student group work or as a lab set-up area.
This is my desk, directly across from the door. I have it at an angle on purpose, but in this pic it just looks crooked … lol! I don’t have all of my plants moved back to school yet so the counter looks a little bare, but once my plants are back home it’ll look like a jungle! On the counter behind my desk are all of my resources and in the drawers and cabinets are office supplies, folders, binders, etc.
Here I’m standing in the front of the room looking toward the left. This is the counter where we do a lot of our microscope work. Behind the stacks of textbooks are the outlets for them. In the glassfront cabinets above I have a mixture of display objects like skulls, preserved organisms, and models.
Here you see more of the lab area. I use this for multiple purposes … it’s a demo table, a spot for me to keep some of my handouts for each unit (you can see the big pile of freshly xeroxed handouts in the red sorter) and a place for me to sit (very rarely) and watch over the kids while they’re working.
This view is standing in the front of the classroom looking toward the back.
I’ve arranged my tables differently for this year. I’ve always had them in L-shaped groupings. The round table in the front is for student use if I have an overflow which I will for this year. The door that you see straight back by my desk is the door to the prep room that I share with one of our Chemistry/Forensic Science teachers. It’s an awesome space and I’m grateful to have a place to keep chemicals and the myriad of other things that would otherwise clutter up my room.
This is my computer work station. I just added the table to make it an L shape this summer. I LOVE this set-up! I have a ton more room to work now. You can see my new document camera … I’ve been playing with it a bit so I’ll know what I’m doing when I actually have to use it. This is a necessity for Interactive Notebooks so I can easily show the kids what I’m doing when we set them up. And I’ll also be having students come up and show their work to the rest of the class with it.
There are a couple of totally new things in this pic. First of all is my Word Wall, seen to the far right. I’ve never had a word wall before – very few high school teachers do – but I’m really going to focus on vocabulary acquisition this year and I definitely see the merit. I’m going to change the words with each unit. In biology there is a TON of vocab the kids need to learn … I’m going to pick the 10 or 12 most important terms from each unit to highlight here. We’ll still do word work with the other terms as well.
The red crates are for storage of the kids’ ISNs. After much thought I decided that I don’t want them taking them out of the room, except to study for a test. In that case I’m going to have them sign them out. Freshmen are notoriously unorganized and these notebooks are too important to take a chance on a kid losing theirs. Besides, they’ll get totally chewed up in their lockers. I work on organization with them in many other ways but I really feel that I need to keep a watchful eye on these notebooks. There’s one crate for each separate section of class.
From here you can see the whole classroom area. My Smartboard is up front (why it was installed unevenly with my whiteboard I have no idea .. sighhhhh). The baskets on the tables contain the supplies the kids will be using for their notebooks … highlighters, colored pencils, tape and glue sticks.
This is an area for student supplies. The 21-cubby sorter is for extra copies of the labs. The bookshelf holds a 3-drawer cubby for lined, graph and colored paper, files for extra copies of handouts, and miscellaneous items. See the big open floor area? I’ve never had that before until I arranged my tables they way they are now. So this is where I’m putting the carpet and bean bag chairs when they come in (I ordered them yesterday). That is something totally new to me … most high school teachers don’t have areas like this in their rooms … and I’m not sure how its going to work out. But I really want to try them and I’m going to use them as a reward tied to Class Dojo. I’ll post a pic when I’ve got that all arranged.
So, there you have it. I’ve tried very hard to make my classroom welcoming and warm, while still keeping it in “work mode.”
I’d love to hear your feedback on what I’ve shown you! Leave a comment and let me know what you think … and thanks for reading this long post!
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