Whether you clean house in May or June when you get out of school, or you run home and off to vacation and wait until July or August, classroom prep still needs to be done, some years more than others. So join Brittany and Ellie as we take the Teaching Toolbox into the realm of preparing your classroom for the fall.

Topics Discussed

• Clean, Organize, Donate, and Toss
• The Walls
• Materials
• Layout

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Brittany 0:00

Hey, Ellie, when the last day of school let out, did you stick around to clean and organize your classroom? Or did you like hightail it out of there and head for vacation?

Ellie 0:13

Just thinking about vacation makes me want to go somewhere right now. I would get done whatever I could in any downtime during the last week of school, or after school during that last week, and after the kids left. And then on the last day, we typically had some time after the kids left. But before we could leave, so I would get some organizing done, then. How about you?

Brittany 0:36

We usually had a day after the kids left that we had to come back for, like if they left on a Thursday, we'd have to come back on Friday. And we'd have a going away breakfast and say goodbye to the retirees and meet some of the new employees. And then we could work in our rooms. But we could also leave as soon as our checklist was completed. So I usually tried to hit the bricks as soon as breakfast was over. So whether you clean house in May or June, when you get out of school, or you run home and off to vacation like me and wait until July or August, classroom prep still needs to be done some years more than others. So join me Brittany, and my friend, Ellie.

Ellie 1:29

Hello,

Brittany 1:30

as we take the teaching toolbox into the realm of preparing your classroom for the fall.

Ellie 1:36

So who doesn't appreciate a good cleaning and decluttering session, clearing out old materials that you no longer need? It's like clearing your mind. Really? Have you ever found items from a project you barely remember, it's always a little trip down memory lane, but clearing them out makes room for new ideas and projects that will shape your current year. So first might come your cleaning, remove items from certain spaces and clean the space. Throw away the trash candy wrappers and candy that kids might have stuck in various places. Look for the bugs and the bug droppings and get the dust and the cobwebs. It seems like no matter when the room was cleaned, there's always some of that hanging around.

Brittany 2:21

Yes, yeah. The fastest way to do this is to use a wipe like a Clorox or a gentler variety. But you'll end up using a lot of wipes to do that. You can also use a spray cleaner and paper towels or a rag. But it'll just take longer having to shift items from one hand to another and back again. Before putting things back on the shelves or in the cabinets and drawers, go through the piles and items and really examine whether or not you're going to use them. Or if you've ever used them. Teachers are great at being packrats for the in case of moments. But this creates clutter which creates an overwhelming feeling.

Ellie 3:05

I agree. But I do have to be honest, I did have cupboards full of items that I did not need or use, but I kept them just in case. A few things were actually items I inherited from the teacher I replaced when I first started teaching. So some of these things were really old. Like the last time I cleaned out my closets I found old 45 records of multiplication table songs. I don't know how old those were. I never I think I checked the copyright date, but I'm not sure. But anyway, if you don't need or want it, just have two bins nearby donate and trash and then put it in the applicable bin. And then you can deal with those later on. I did always need to do a good cleaning out of my desk as well. I often did not do that before the summer break. So I had to clear out papers or excess junk during my cleaning time. But I have to say it felt really good.

Brittany 4:02

Yeah, me too. my desk was always the worst. But remember to do your shelves, your cabinets, your storage rooms, literally anywhere you have materials stored, get those done.

Ellie 4:14

Now once you've cleaned and analyzed your materials, it's time to put them away, put them back. The trick is to think about how you do this, make categorical areas and make sure everything goes together. What you don't want is to have pencils in three or even more in different spots like I might have, you may have them into like a student usage area and then an extra supplies area but that should be it. And that goes for everything from construction paper to notebooks to student rewards and so on. divvy up your supply space. So you have an art area, an extra student supplies area, first aid items and that kind of thing. And then use bins and baskets maybe from the dollar store or from your own collection to keep things neat and tidy within each of those areas.

Brittany 5:00

My husband is great at having like things in 17 different spaces around the house. My birth father was an actual hoarder. My mom often had piles everywhere. And so I kind of started out with those tendencies as well. And I tend to be a big picture person. So I need to see and understand the big picture before I can organize it. And so I, in my first few years of teaching, when things were very fluid, and curriculums were changing and all that I had piles and piles of curriculum, worksheets, notes, etc. I knew where things were within the piles, but I just couldn't stop myself from making piles. And so finally, when the curriculum stopped changing, I took a week of my summer vacation, and I sorted all the piles, I used all my student desks, and I made four piles per desk, and sorted everything into, you know, all those different piles. So I had like 80 different sorting stations at once, and eventually sorted everything into different file folders. And never again, did I have piles, my room was so organized after then it was heaven. So since those first few years, I was very organized, I like to keep clean, minimalistic areas, if I can, I try to pick a cupboard, a room, a closet, or what have you every month and go through it purging, deep cleaning, organizing, etc.

Ellie 6:43

I love that I need to actually adopt that habit. Myself, I did tend to have piles as well, I finally started using binders and getting a little bit more organized. But it's hard. There's so much there's so much around. So you need to really think about having a system that can help you. Yeah, so once everything is cleaned, evaluated, organized and rearranged. Now is the time to deal with those two boxes. For the trash box. See what paper or plastic you can recycle and then dump the rest or kindly ask a custodian to handle it for you.

Brittany 7:18

For the Donate bin comb back through it quickly. Make sure nothing's broken, that everything is really in a donatable state. If your teacher's lounge or grade level has a donate table, drop it off there. Otherwise stop by a Goodwill or other donation center in your area and let them handle it. Don't give it a second thought and don't ever take anything out of that box.

Ellie 7:46

Now if my husband were helping to do that he would be removing things.

Brittany 7:50

So would mine.

Ellie 7:52

All right, then after you've got all that cleaning done, you can move on to the walls. Was decorating the room, one of your most or least favorite activities. Brittany, when you were prepping for the school year?

Brittany 8:03

I am not a decorator, it is not in my blood. I am not a handy or crafty person. I lacked the skills to move something from vision to reality and the decorating sense of things. So although I would have dreams of having a giant map on my wall or visual timelines, they they never came to fruition. I stuck with the canned posters from the teacher store, a calendar, a goals area, and then a few random things. And that was about it. What type of decorations did you have?

Ellie 8:40

Um, well, I had the calendar. I usually had bulletin boards for the first topics of the year. And sometimes those were things that I bought at the teacher's store. And other times I would make things I would have a lot of those math posters from the teacher's store that could stay up all year. Some years I had this really big coordinate plane that I made and it had all four quadrants on it, where I could put coordinate plane problem of the week. So sometimes I made bulletin boards on my walls where there really weren't bulletin boards, I would just like staple stuff to the walls. I wasn't supposed to do that. Nobody tell. But it did. And then students could also just use that coordinate plane as reference. So I had that up there. I had those my big number lines at the top of two walls, my fraction decimal percent number line and my positive negative integers number line. I made those that one year and then I kept putting those up every year. Sometimes I would have a word wall section above my board. So I would start the word wall words at the beginning of the year. Some years I had my net with my beach balls hanging in the corner, because that was fun for me. And then every year I always felt like creating some type of new decoration. Like one year I made a palm tree and then had my word wall words with a beachy theme that started at the palm tree. And during my very first year of teaching, I made a Bugs Bunny and I made a Daffy Duck holding a homework book that had a caption above it that said, like, do you have your homework, something like that. And I use that every single year for 24 years, I had it like a doorway as they were leaving above where they would write their homework down. Now, I'm not a good artist. So I would actually I made these by taking the overhead projector, putting a picture on the overhead projector, projecting it onto the wall, making it really big so that I could trace it. So don't think that I'm a good artist or anything like that. I just used that and enlarged it and then traced over and then I think I actually painted those with, with black paint and different different paints so that it was a little sturdier to last longer. And then I would also put our memory wheels from the previous year outside in the hallway. So the as kids were coming in, we actually probably did that in the summertime when they had orientation. So we put the memory wheels out so that kids can see what kind of things there were to look forward to at the beginning of their school year.

Wow, that's a lot. And it sounds exciting and interesting. How about your room was beautiful.

Yeah, it was okay.

Whenever it was my turn to decorate the hallway, I just left it blank.

We all have our different strengths.

Yeah. So what about materials? What kind of things did you always have ready for the start of the year, were you good at copying far ahead of time?

I would try to be good at copying far ahead of time. But it didn't always work that way, we could send out our big copying jobs, things for the whole year to our central office, and it would be done for us there. So I would try to get that out at the end of the school year. But if I wasn't successful, then I tended to have to go in, in the weeks before school and copy it all myself. I also tended to try new things every year. And so I would end up doing a lot of a copying of those things. In the couple of weeks before the school year started. Sometimes I will copy my spiral review for the first quarter if I hadn't gotten it sent out, copy the first week getting to know you kind of stuff, and even some emergency sub plans stuff. Because you never know some times. One year my father in law passed away. That was September 4. So I don't think I missed a school day with kids. Because we didn't start till after Labor Day that year. But I did miss in service days. So like you never know something can pop up that you're not ready for. So if you have some emergency things ready to go, you're in good shape.

As for copying, I'm at my first school, we didn't have a copy center for the longest time. And we just had to do our own. And we were just a charter school, just beginning. So there would be a line at the copy machine because we only had one. And it would be there from like 6am to 6pm for the whole two weeks before school started. So you'd have to get there like really early or stay late to get your copy done. And we sent home a ton of paper. We sent home information forms, emergency contact forms, releases and liability statements for the school. Our policies and procedures packet, we sent home our first newsletter of the year, we sent home a virtually blank piece of paper that said, that just said, Would you write us a letter about your child? The rest of it was all blank. And we basically just killed whole forests back then I think.

Yeah, it's at least now some of these things potentially could be online. And there might be a little bit fewer things to copy and hand out like that.

Yeah.

Some other things that I would try to have ready were name tag size pieces of poster board. So we would make, I don't know, maybe eight inches long, two inches high, three inches high poster board pieces. So students would create their own name tags, and then they would just set it on their desk. So it would stay on their desk or get taped to their desk. Sometimes we made them like tents. And they would take their name tags to their different classes with them till all of us learn their names. So I'd have the things like that ready to go. I always needed a large white construction paper because I had students draw pictures of themselves and then make notes all around them about things about them. Things for icebreaker materials, depending on the game or activity, you might be planning, rules and expectations pages like you mentioned, I had to get those ready as well and any communications cheat sheets for parents. Some years we had home folders so students would take their tests and quizzes home in these folders for their parents to sign off that they had seen their progress and actually seeing the physical tests or quizzes not just necessarily what was in the gradebook online, but they could look at the document. So those folders and forms had to be prepped. Some years I gave students folders for each different class period of colored according to what class period they were in. And so those folders stayed in the classroom at all times, so their warm ups could go in there. But those would have to be ready and prepared. Homework trays, and bins or notes trays, I loved my trays. I like to decorate them with duct tape and stuff,

I love my trays too

Fast finisher items, locker numbers, we had to hand out so we had to get the lockers handed out and get the information. So that all had to be prepped. I used to have lots of post its so that we could do some of those really short answer questions, you know, What do teachers need to know to help you and they would write down their answer on the post it and then put it up on the board. And they didn't have to put their name on it. So lots of post its for things like that. The books to pass out had to be prepared because we did have textbooks for most of our subjects. So we had to make sure each textbook had a number in it. And then we had to record which student received which books so the books had to be ready to go. And seating charts. I usually just had one for my homeroom. And then I worked on the charts for my other classes during the first couple of days because the rosters would switch and change. So there wasn't a whole lot of point in prepping that too far ahead of time. Classroom library materials, I would make sure that my classroom library books were in order, like with all the bindings facing out, and they're not stacked in different piles. If you're someone who has a good organization system for your classroom library, then you want to have that in place, I have to admit that I was not super organized with my classroom library. How about you?

Well, I had every book labeled with a sticker with a code like E nine E 10. and so forth. But and I had a checkout sheet, but I never checked it. I never made sure they were doing it right.

Yeah, that was one thing that wasn't high on my list. And then I would make sure that my calculators I would hang my put my calculators in those shoe holders, hang it over a door and then put numbers on each calculator. Because when students came to class, they would take the calculator with their number on it, and then put it back there when they were finished. So I made sure I had all my calculators ready to go.

We had a lot of the same materials ready for the first days, we had sticky name tags, instead of like construction paper, or whatever. Mainly because our specials teachers wanted name tags in every class, and parents did not want pins put on shirts. And so we just ended up doing sticky name tags every day for like two weeks. We also had red, green and yellow construction paper that had to be cut in strips for an activity on classroom expectations. We'd help students set up their binders or folders. And so we had a lot of sticky labels, usually a sheet of 30 labels per student with their different subjects on it their name, things like homework turn in, and other things like that. So we'd help them set up their binders that usually took a good afternoon. And then I also loved my baskets and trays, I had them for students, I had them for the work area, I had them for myself to keep track of all my things. I had a morning notes basket on my desk so that kids wouldn't just come to me and rapid fire. My mom said this, my dad said this, here's a note here, they would just put everything in the morning note basket.

And just thinking about the first day or two of school. Like there's all these things that all these papers, all these items, the books, the locker numbers, all those things. And I think it's really important that you have somewhere that you're actually putting all of those things kind of in order for your day. You know, I mean, if I had to keep my things in a pile, I would kind of criss cross my piles so that I could see where one started or the other and, you know, began whatever, or I would have tabs on them. So I could see which one was for what exact item or I would even line them up along on my calendar so that it was easy access. And I wouldn't have to spend minutes going, oh, shoot, where did I put that? Or, you know, waste time in that way. So it's good to just make sure you know exactly how you're going to organize all of those materials for the beginning days.

Yeah, I would do like a cascading stack. So the bottom one would be like at the top edge of the table. And then the next one would be just below the title of the one previous and then the next one would be just below the title of the previous and I use a lot of color. I tried to color code things so that it would help me track what paper was what color we were allowed to use pastel colors pretty much all we wanted. And so I would, I would use color to help me organize things. And then another thing you want to consider is how are you going to track all that stuff as it comes back from parents? Like you're gonna want to have a check in system to know who's brought you back what forms and what notes, and who hasn't, so that you know, who to badger in a week or so.

Yes, very good point. I think I would have a spreadsheet with the kids names and every document on there. So I could kind of check that off as as things were received. All right, then finally, maybe want to think about the layout of your classroom? Does it invite collaboration? Is there enough space for students to actually move around safely? Can it address specific student needs that you might have in your classroom, I used to experiment with different seating arrangements before I would decide which one I like to start out the year. Sometimes traditional rows are fine in the beginning, or sometimes circles or group tables can change the dynamic of your classroom, it depends kind of what you're going for, on those first days of school. If you're not sure what seating arrangement you want to use, you can head to Episode 31, where we discuss seating options and their Pros and Cons. I did tend to assign seats on the first day of school, when students arrived, part of their job was to look at the seating chart that was projected on the board and use that to find their seats, because it told me a couple things, just watching, you know, who could read the diagram, and then transfer the diagram to the actual seats, who was confident in their decision and then be like, this is where I'm sitting, this is my seat. This isn't who was not. So it tells you more than just Oh, yeah, whether or not they can find their seat, you know what I mean?

I tended to let students sit where they wanted the first partial week, we usually started on a Wednesday or Thursday for a half day, and then finished out that week, whatever it was another day or two. And so those first couple days and a half, I would let the students choose where they sat. And by doing that, I got to see who the big talkers were, who gravitated toward the back, who sat by their friends, who those friends were. And then I could make my seating charts with all that knowledge in hand so that when Monday rolled around, I would drop the hammer. Also being someone of a larger size, you might need to take that into consideration. Can you walk around between the desk? Can you get to all the students? Can you help kids without sticking your rear end in another kid's face, you know, be proactive and think about the bad things before they become bad. I tended to prefer rows of groups of two for the first quarter. And then I would move into pods and some rows for second quarter. And then all pods for third. And then pods with friend groups for fourth. And I did think of something else. Another thing you might want to prepare are like slideshows like who you are, as a teacher, you might want to do like a slideshow on. This is my family. This is my dog. And you know, this is how long I've been teaching, or whatever. This is what we're going to cover this year. And then you might also want to go ahead and do the same basic one for Open House night or whatever. So that you've got those ready, excellent idea.

I think for a few years, I had a note to students written now all about me, but it also had mistakes in it. So it was like language arts related, so they also had to find the mistakes at the same time. All right. So we've got a lot of things to think about here. So whether you duck out right away in the summertime, May or June and you clean in the fall, or you stay and get it done in the spring or early summer. Cleaning, organizing and preparing your room for a new year and a new class of kids is very important. It helps clear your room, your mind and your spirit. So you're ready to tackle the new challenges that await you with a new class.

We hope this gave you some new ideas and some new tools for your teaching toolbox. As you prepare for your new school year ahead. Make sure you take time to prepare your mind your spirit and your classroom for the travails and fun times ahead. We'll talk with you next time.

Have a great day.