Classroom Tour: Year 4

It's a new year, and our school is currently going through about 101 transitions all at once. We have switched to an A/B schedule with 4 90-minute classes each day that rotate throughout the week. We have started to implement career academies and small learning communities; we have completely changed up our curriculum in an effort to better deal with Common Core (complete with some pretty intense pacing), and we've started a freshmen academy, which comes with its own host of changes and transitions to navigate.

One of the switches we needed to make for our freshmen academy was to move all of the 9th grade teachers to the same location, which meant that I needed to pack up all my junk and make my new place habitable again. I was just starting to feel at home in my old one, too, but that's usually the way it works, isn't it? In truth, I was a bit emotional about my old classroom...it was my very first, and I had a bit of an attachment to it, but now that I'm settled, I feel like this new room has some potential as well :)

Pictures below!

I opted for book bins (actually dish washing bins from Wal-Mart) organized by genre this year. I love how it makes books a bit more accessible for browsing AND allows me to group books together in such a way that kids might come across some choices that they may not have considered before. 

This is my own take on the choice boards that I've seen floating around for elementary classrooms. I'll be honest...most of my kids aren't flocking to it looking for what they can work on if they're finished with their work, but I'm also using it as one of my sources for extra credit assignments throughout the year. That way, there's never any doubt as to what students can do to boost their grades.

How I deal with absences and make-up work...assignments and activities are written down on our class calendars, and handouts are left in the class folders to the right. 

I've tried a few seating arrangements over the past few years, and this one is definitely my favorite...I love how it creates a space that is conducive to whole class discussion but can easily be changed and rearranged to facilitate group and partner work. I'm moving around constantly, and this set-up makes it easy for me to get to everyone quickly without stumbling over book bags and falling on my face. 

Now the really sad thing is that my classroom is nowhere near this clean anymore. Oh well...evidence of lots of learning happening, right??