So, hey, this is the second topic from the EDUblog prompt. 2 weeks in a row! Haha. Sadly, the topic is about the classroom environment.
I say sadly because I have a very passably functional room. I have a few posters in my room that are mostly to fill up the white space. Many of them have content, but also one of the reasons I don’t spend a lot of time decorating…they have become what I call visual white noise…No one really looks at them other than to notice the occasional new poster.
Kids are kids and unless I use the posters often, they just fade into the scenery.
https://giphy.com/embed/q8C0Ljmy4F6Ss
via GIPHY
We are also school that focuses, and has been trained with the Kagan Cooperative groups, so my desks are in groups of four, with a few outliers (islands, I have heard them called). This is good and bad. There are times where I would like to move things around…but I don’t feel like taking 30-45 minutes for set up and take down of something new. LOL
As far as organization…well I have work to do. My style is “buy/find (copy paper) a box to put stuff in to hide it from looking cluttery but then losing what it was forever”.
Though I am proud of my library organization. One summer I reordered all my books by “genre”. (I use the term loosely because some were “I looked at the cover and saw animals…therefore “animal genre”). Then I numbered the plastic tubs with a number and labeled all books with corresponding number. This is helpful when I want students to put books back in a semi-organized way. They are kids, after all. 🙂
That is all for now.
Derrick