In this episode of the Happy Music Teacher podcast, you'll discover game-changing strategies to streamline your music classroom setup and keep all your essential equipment at your fingertips. We dive into the concept of the Front Table Teacher Toolbox – a handy caddy filled with must-have tools and accessories, ensuring you're always ready for any teaching scenario.

Learn the importance of Designated Storage Spaces, where each type of equipment gets its own specific place. This simple organizational tweak makes it a breeze to locate items quickly, saving you precious time during lessons. The episode introduces the power of Visual Labels and a Color-Coding System, providing a visual roadmap for easy identification and retrieval of instruments and toys at a glance.

Explore the benefits of a Weekly Set-Up Routine, helping you establish a seamless classroom environment where all necessary equipment is within reach before each lesson. Discover how Accessibility Zones transform your classroom layout, ensuring that high-traffic areas grant easy access to frequently used items, minimizing the time spent searching and maximizing teaching efficiency.

You'll also hear valuable insights on leveraging Student Helpers and their role in organizing and distributing equipment. Additionally, the episode covers Efficient Passing Techniques, teaching your students how to handle instruments and manipulatives safely, minimizing disruptions and contributing to a focused learning environment. Finally, Quick-Access Zones are unveiled, suggesting the designation of specific areas within the classroom for frequently used items, promoting accessibility for both teachers and students. Tune in for a wealth of practical tips to enhance your music teaching experience!

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What we talked about:

Labels for Instruments

Instrument Bar Labels

More labels

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Now, let's get onto the episode!

Are you an elementary music teacher who's frustrated and overwhelmed?

I'm Jeanette Shorry, a happy music teacher who loves teaching every day, but it wasn't long ago I was in your shoes.

Join me Wednesdays to help you find happy in your music classroom.

You know how, I don't know, maybe this just happens to me, but you know how you're looking for something, you're like, oh my gosh, I tend to get random wild ideas right in the middle of class sometimes.

And I'm like, where is that thing?

And that used to happen to me a lot more before I really put everything into a streamlined system in my music classroom.

So now I have everything in a place, and I have my things organized.

I have strategies in place to make sure that everything is at my fingertips at all times.

So today, I am going to offer you seven tips on how to streamline your music classroom and keep everything right at your fingertips.

First of all, Front Table Teacher Toolbox.

Front Table Teacher Toolbox.

If you do not have a table in the front of your room with all of your daily used things, I recommend this first.

It could be a long table, it could be a desk, it could be whatever it happens to be.

I would keep some sort of table in the front of your classroom that has all of your essential tools in it, on it, something like that.

So I like to have a pencil and pen caddy, and I like to have, I have in the, I don't have in this classroom, but in my last classroom, I had the Parapol Conga drums, and they needed to be tuned, and they needed a special tool.

So I kept that special tool right there in my toolbox so that I had it handy.

You'll want some paper, like a pad of paper, that sort of thing.

If you are doing assessments, which you, if you're going to do assessments, you want to have either your iPad handy so that you can do them on a Google Sheet.

That is how I like to do it.

And that's a talk for another day, but you'll have your iPad handy with your seating chart and with your assessment chart on your Google Sheet, et cetera.

Anything that you use on a regular basis.

And what I recommend is sit down.

I'm telling you, take the time to do this.

Take like 15 or 20 minutes and sit down and write out all of the things that you know you need on a daily basis and keep them right in your teaching area on some sort of table, some sort of bin, a desk, whatever it happens to be, like a student desk.

It could be whatever, but you want all of those essential tools close by.

Then when you tear down your classroom at the end of the year, because I don't know about you, I always have to tear down my classroom, you'll have a list so that next year you can rebuild your teacher toolbox.

And you can also add to that list as you go.

So if you make it on a Google Sheet, then it can be there and you can just add to it.

You can print it out and you can add to it as you go on.

So a front table teach, a front table teacher toolbox is definitely a plus.

Number two, you want designated storage spaces for all of your equipment.

You want them in a specific place so that they're easy to locate.

Along with your designated storage place, you want visual labels.

So you want storage bins, you want shelves.

When I was teaching at my fourth and fifth grade school, I had these beautiful, I mentioned them before, Congo Drums.

And I used to have them just sitting on the floor.

And then one day, all of a sudden, it hit me.

I don't know why, but all of a sudden it hit me.

What if I put them on the shelves?

First of all, they would look neater.

Second of all, they would be so accessible to my students.

So I bought some shelves, and I stored them on these shelves, and I stored them by, like I had the high ones, the medium ones, and the low ones.

And I had them labeled by high, medium, and low, and they were right there, nice and easy to tell.

You can get storage bins, you can get shelves.

Print out some of those visual labels.

You will find tons of them on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Do not spend the time making them yourself, unless you have to, like unless you have something in your classroom that most teachers don't have, and you need to like do an extra one or two.

But look on Teachers Pay Teachers.

I will link to my favorites, and label everything.

That way, you're going to know where it is, and your students are going to know where it is.

The other thing when you're labeling is do a color coding system.

So you want everything to, for example, all of your woods, you would want to, let's say maybe you want all of your woods to be with a brown.

So maybe you have a brown square, or you have a purple square, I don't know, whatever it happens to be, or your label is purple, whatever it is, so that all of your woods are labeled.

So when your students are like, when you say to your students, everybody go get a wood off the table or the shelf, they know where they're looking, it's the purples.

You could do, so we've got what?

Woods, metals, shakers and scrapers, and drums or skins.

So each one of those could have a different label.

Then if you, I highly recommend that you keep stickies and some sort of writing utensil, pens, pencils, really not pens, it's not a good idea to have pens, but I mean, the kids love to write with them, so maybe pens.

But like every little, I had my students sitting in pods when I was teaching fourth and fifth grade, and I highly recommend the pods.

And then each pod had their own little designated storage spaces, so they would have pencils and sticky pads and scrap paper, and they would have crayons and whatever you need for them to have, because my students did a lot of project work, and that would be right in their bin by their pod.

So a designated storage space with visual labels and a color coding system is going to be your best friend.

Number four, you want a weekly setup routine.

You do not want to set up your classroom every day.

And we're gonna get into more of this particular strategy in my new course Chaos to Calm.

This is part of what I teach you in this course is some routines and some weekly setup strategies to help you with setting up your classroom.

So I'm gonna give you like seven or eight or nine or 10 strategies for ways to set up your classroom, not only how to set it up, but and what I mean by setting it up is like your instruments and that sort of thing.

And I'm gonna tell you how to make it so that you do not have to pass instruments out and collect instruments every single day.

You want this to be a weekly routine with all the necessary equipment within reach before each lesson.

So if you are passing out instruments, then you would want all of your instruments sitting in front of you in their little bins or boxes.

You do not want to have to walk over and get them.

Or you may want them to be under the student seats, or you may have a passing out routine.

So whatever the case may be, you want to establish a weekly setup routine, not a daily setup routine.

You want to have those instruments out for the entire week.

And again, we are going to talk about lots and lots of time-saving setup routines in my course Chaos to Calm.

Number five, you want to have some accessibility zones.

So you want to arrange your classroom.

And again, this is something that we're going to take a deep dive in in Chaos to Calm.

You want to arrange in a layout so that the high traffic areas are easily accessible.

So you want to be able to get to the instruments that you use the most, the toys you use the most, those sorts of things, so you don't have to spend a lot of time searching for things.

You also want to arrange your classroom so that most things are on the edges, on the periphery of your classroom.

So you have lots of room for your students to move and lots of room for all the good things that happen in the music classroom.

Number six, you want to have some student helpers.

So there are lots and lots of ways that you can have student helpers.

You can have some students who, like in every class, you can have student helpers and you can switch them weekly.

I do not recommend that because it's too hard for me anyway.

I mean, you may be more organized than me, but I find it very difficult to redo student helpers every week.

I like to do, if I'm doing student helpers, I like to do monthly student helpers.

So every month, I pick maybe four students who are my helpers and they are doing all the things.

If I need somebody to run an errand, that person is doing that.

If I need people to pass out instruments, that person is doing that.

You could, and I like to do it by random.

I don't like to do like, ooh, the good kids because that means that the kids who don't do such a good job are always going to be picked last and they know they're going to be picked last.

And you know, there's nothing more frustrating to an adult even than like knowing, I know I'm going to be picked last.

Like when I was a little girl, I always got picked last for sports because I was not very sporty.

I am much more sporty now.

But at the time when I was little, I was backwards and just, you know, had two left feet and I wasn't very coordinated.

So I got picked last for everything.

So kids that struggle know they're struggling.

And if you are picking those responsible kids, honestly, I have found you may find different, but I have found that students that like it doesn't inspire them to do a better job most of the time, because if you were listening to my podcast last week, where we talked about why students misbehave many times, they can't help it.

So you're not doing the many favors by picking the students who are doing a quote-unquote good job.

So I like to pick them at random.

I have most classes have student numbers.

And so I just number 1 to 25 or whatever, and I pick out, you know, 4 people.

And then the next time I put those off to the side, or I write them down or whatever, and the next time I pick 4 more people, etc.

So you can do monthly student helpers.

You could also do something where as the students are lined up, you can have them as they're coming in, be like, okay, blah, blah, blah, blah.

1, 2, 3, and 4, please pick up a bin each and pass out.

You know, you can do it that way.

Or you can, if you don't want to deal with all that, you can have one class where, and I usually like to pick the class that has like the students who are having trouble misbehaving because they love to help.

And I try to inspire them.

In this case, it usually does work.

And I'll be like, can you pick me four of your students who really need a little bit of help, like getting their sillies out at the beginning of the day?

And I will have them help set up and they will come every week on Monday or on Friday or whatever it happens to be.

And I will enlist their help.

Now, this does mean that you have to be planned out ahead of time, but I recommend that anyway.

It is super important to plan things out.

Number seven, you need to have some efficient passing out techniques.

You need to train your students on good and safe ways to pass out and collect instruments and manipulatives and toys so that first of all, it takes the least amount of time and second, it minimizes disruption.

So we are going to take a deep dive into passing out techniques and transitions in my course Chaos to Calm, but let me give you a couple of thoughts.

So one of the ways that I like to do it is if I am using the same instrument for everybody, let's say my little ones, we all sit in a circle and I pass them, I pass an instrument to my right and I'll say pass it down, pass it down, to the right.

When I get to the word right, I pass a second one.

They pass it all the way around until it gets to the person on my left, like the person right on my left, and when I'm explaining it, I'll say this one is going to Colton, and Colton will be the person on my left, and we are going to pass it all the way around.

I make them sing with me so that they're not talking.

And if things start to get chaotic, we freeze, and we stop, and I say stop, reset, and then we start again.

I mean, it does take probably three or four times, but once you've got that going, that is a really good way to do it.

Another way you can do it is to call a group up at a time.

Red group, please come and get drums.

Purple group, please come and get drums, et cetera, et cetera.

So those are two good passing techniques.

And if you train your students in the beginning of the school year, that is going to help you.

Again, I've got lots more passing out strategies and transition strategies in my course Chaos to Calm.

Number seven, quick access zones.

So you want there to be specific areas in the classroom for items that you use all the time.

So that way it's easy for you and for your students to access that equipment.

For example, obviously instruments are something that you want to have easy access to.

You do not want your instruments sitting in a closet because you will never use them because it'll be irritating to get them out.

You want your instruments out and accessible.

And then anything else you use a lot.

If you do a lot of project work like I did when I was working with fourth and fifth graders, then you want to have those easy access items that you can get out quickly if you use, let's say, I don't know, I used to have these keyboards in my classroom that you could hook up to the Chromebooks and those were out on a shelf.

So anything that is easy to, anything that you are using a lot should be out in quick access zones.

So let's go back and do a quick review.

Number one, you want a Front Table Teacher Toolbox with all the items that you're going to need as the teacher right there in your toolbox.

Keep a list, add to the list when you need to.

Number two, designated storage spaces with visual labels and a color coding system is going to help you.

It might take a little time to set it up, but it is amazing.

Number three, a weekly set up routine.

You want to establish some sort of routine for setting up your classroom that is going to work every time, and you only want to do it once a week.

Number four, you want to set up accessibility zones.

Arrange your classroom so that you have use, you have access to all the things that you need.

Number five, make sure you assign student helpers.

Number six, use efficient passing out techniques.

And number seven, have some quick access zones, specific areas where you put your frequently used items.

If you got some great tips and tidbits that are going to help you become a happy music teacher, I would be so thankful if you'd leave me a review.

Thanks so much for your time.

Well, that's all I have for you today.

But before I go , let me remind you , keep learning , keep growing , and keep being fabulous you.