MAGIC REALLY DOES EXIST: THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING UP YOUR CLASSROOM (PART ONE)

Image courtesy of KonMari.com

The Inspiration

This past week I signed up for Educators 2 Educators Teacher New Year Reboot Conference. While there was a lot of great information available at this conference, the thing I wanted to see more than anything was The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Your Classroom from Building Book Love.

I'd previously read Marie Kondo's book, but had never thought about applying it to my classroom before. I've been feeling stressed lately about the size of my room, and the lack of storage and wall space, so seeing BBL's post on Instagram seemed serendipitous.

When I watched her presentation, the number one thing that stood out to me was the concept of taking EVERYTHING out and then figuring out how to organize things. I had been trying to organize around the things I had already stored, even though those things had been put away haphazardly in a rush at the beginning of the year and where they were placed really made no sense. No wonder I wasn't making any progress!

Feeling super energized and optimistic, I decided to commit my entire teacher planning day after Winter Break to this challenge.

If you're interested in doing the same in your room, I highly recommend you join Building Book Love's Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up Your Classroom FREE 7 Day Challenge.


Day One

A quick snapshot of what me room looked like daily.

Despite my enthusiasm, it took a little effort to get going. What can I say? Coming back to work after two weeks and hitting the ground running is a little rough. Still, I eventually did start pulling out all of my belongings and stacking them on the desks in the middle of my room. The only things I left in place were student binders and notebooks, because I knew I wanted them to stay where they were. EVERYTHING else came out. EVERYTHING.

It was kind of exhausting removing items from every corner of the room, but it also felt really good to take stock of what I had. In the 7 years I've been teaching I've been through 4 subject areas, 4 classrooms, and combined with a co-teacher with 25 years experience. So while I had a lot of the usual clutter of supplies and materials, I also had a ton of off miscellaneous items around. I honestly could not have told you half of what was in my room.

But with everything pulled out and categorized, things didn't seem so bleak. I realized I had a fair amount of space to store things on shelves if I organized properly, and I had more wall space available once the boxes and bins were out of the way.

All of my sorted piles

The first major thing I did was recognize that I simply could not store our Relay for Life fundraising materials in my room. I had shirts, wristbands, and other materials filling up filing cabinet drawers, bookshelves, and tabletops. Feeling frustrated, I vented to my sister whose own room is one building over from mine. And, like the sound of angels from heaven, she told me:

"I have an empty cabinet this can probably all fit in."

BAM! Big cart, 3 shelves, and 3 filing cabinet drawers were freed! Talk about magic!

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Next I went into my miscellaneous pile. I knew some of it would be tricky to sort and organize, but there was also clearly a lot that I simply did not need. With ruthless precision I yanked out anything I knew right away was unnecessary and started a give away pile.

I also started a return pile because, apparently, I had things that belonged to a number of other people.

Once the pile had grown too big to fit on one desk, I bagged it up and brought it to our planning room and put it on display. Another sigh of relief. I could finally breathe in my classroom.

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I boxed up the rest of the miscellaneous items to deal with another day, then moved on to my novels. I realized just how few I had actually taken to my new room. I stacked them on my nicest bookshelf and planned to get more books from storage. 

Looking around the room I started to see things I hadn't before. My Harry Potter posters, as much as I loved them, did not match my Superhero theme, so them came down.

I had highlighters stored in three different places. They were all combined into one container.

I HATED the sliding draw organizers I used because of course adding an extra level in my desk drawers made sense. Who wouldn't want more room? Except they slid around, blocked access to the other materials in the drawer, and they were ugly. Now I had the clarity to let them go.

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Near the end of the day I found myself looking back to my desk area repeatedly. There was nothing inherently wrong with it, but it definitely did NOT "spark joy" as Marie Kondo would recommend. It felt cramp and cluttered, and despite having a rack organizer, desk drawers, and a 2 drawer filing cabinet, I was constantly stacking papers on random corners and over my printer until I could get to them. It simply wasn't working.

So I yanked out my desk. I didn't even like it to begin with. It's metal, and it doesn't watch the wood of my shelves or the build in shelf that holds the room's electronics. I had made do with it because it was all I had, but after tidying everything else, I felt ready to try removing it completely!

It didn't work. Or rather, removing my desk and shifting my computer to the side counter didn't work, because then I would be putting my back to the room any time I took attendance or loaded a presentation. No bueno.

Still, removing that desk had felt so good, I simply refused to put it back. After playing around with a number of ideas, I condensed two of the student computers to one table, and dragged the other table over. I tried it in a few spots and finally placed it in a spot that DID spark joy.

With only a few minutes before I would have to leave for my doctorate classes, I rewired my computer, not even caring that the wires were in a cluttered pile. Somehow it still felt better than my old desk and it's hidden wires ever had.

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Several students came in the next day and commented on how much bigger the room looks and how open it is! I really expected them to be chiding me about the massive pile of things I had waiting on our small group table but I guess the overall effect of my tidying and rearranging overrode that.

Their enthusiasm gave me the energy to push through a 12 hour day the next day.

Coming Soon: Day Two

DISORDERLY TEACHING CLASSOOM

Oh my gosh, it took me way longer than I planned to get this post up. I take a lot of pride in my classroom and have wanted a chance to show it off. : ) Apologies for the image heavy post, but how can you do a classroom tour without a ton of pictures?

First a brief bit of background: When designing our classroom, we had our students and our goals in mind. We knew many of our students would never pass the state exam, due to their various learning disorders and disabilities, so our goal was not to drill them repeatedly to force them to do well. Instead we felt the best thing we could do was teach our students to actually enjoy reading.

Many of them have been forced to read and dragged through literacy programs since elementary school. Now in high school they've spent years hating reading and many can't think of a single time they enjoyed reading something. They've just resigned themselves to being forced to do it (or fake it) for a few more years until they graduate, after which they plan to avoid reading as much as possible.

With that in mind, we designed Starbooks, a warm, inviting classroom where you'd actually want to cuddle up with a good book. Rather than a coffee café, it's a book café where students get free choice on what they want to read, and time to actually read for fun.

We do plenty of targeted instruction and work as well, but building a love of reading is at the heart of it.

Without further ado... Welcome to Starbooks.

Here's the front half of our classroom. We went for an eclectic collection of tables and chairs, all gathered from our district warehouse and transported by ourselves (and some very kind family members).

The colorful padded chairs had been run down, mildewy, grey things, but my co-teacher Janice reupholstered them, replacing the padding and matching the fabric to our room's color scheme.

 

You can see a full panorama of the classroom here to get a sense of the size and layout:

Our student resource center, including the Turn-It-In bins, writing utensils, and any other supplies the kids may need.

 


We went with the CAFE acronym, created by "the Sisters" in The CAFE Book: Engaging All Students in Daily Literary Assessment and Instruction. We hadn't even heard of CAFE before deciding on our café theme, so it's was a fun coincidence.

 


Our Lingo List (previously the word door neé word wall). The yellow labels are for our ELL student who recently moved here from Puerto Rico.

Across from our Lingo List, we have our Dead Word Graveyard. These words have been banned from answers to encourage our students to expand their vocabulary and not be lazy in their writing. 

This is our multipurpose area for mini conferences, and for students to sit outside of the group for a while if they need some space.

 Books! What good is a Reading classroom without books? Our goal this year was to have 2000 books in our class library. This is our series shelf, one of five bookshelves in the room.

 Comfy Reading corner. Students are ONLY allowed to sit here when reading their books.

This year we tried sorting our books on the shelves using photo boxes. It's great for separating by genre and they can be moved to different areas of the room easily.

Part of enjoying reading is sharing book recommendations with others. Students love recommending a book so they can be put in the display case. We put the book they recommend, and a framed photo of the student who made the recommendation. We threw in some party decorations and fairy lights to jazz it up.

 

Our current learning board. We usually have the anchor chart for our current topic, plus the matching required Marzano scale up.

We also keep up with announcements and events on our board since our kids sometimes get tripped up by the rotating schedule, and may miss announcements. You can see how long ago I actually took these pictures!

It's all about Reading!

This is our Computer On Wheels, aka the COW. I don't know why we're the only teachers in the school to think to put actual cows on our COW, but it makes it easy to find whenever we need to get it back from IT.

Ah, non-negotiables. In addition to class rules, we have specific items that are absolutely not negotiable in any way, shape, or form. We teach our kids to advocate for themselves and speak up if they think something is illogical or unfair, but they know these are off limits.

We also use this to teach the words/parts non-, negotiate, and -able.

One of my favorite quotes. I made this poster years ago when my classroom theme was The Magic of Reading.

I somehow managed to not get a good picture of my desk, but this is the shelf behind it. We try to change it each season. This was for the start of the read to represent me.

My small group area. When we got a budget to redo this classroom in exchange for giving up our previous classrooms and team teaching, we were both super excited to be able to get these tables for small group work. They seem pretty common in elementary, but not in high school.

It's Skippyjon Jones! This is Janice's favorite book series, and she reads to our students every year. You may not expect high school students (some with criminal records) to enjoy a picture book, but they will gather 'round, sit on the floor, and get into it.

More yellow labels for our ELL student. Love him!

And finally, what you don't see when bloggers post pictures of their classrooms - all the mess they had to hide. I told you we have around 2,000 books, and we did NOT have them all sorted by the start of the year. We ended up shoving them in one of the kitchens (our room was previously a culinary room) and worked on sorting them from there: p

I hope you enjoyed a look at our classroom. I wish I could give a better sense of the room but I did my best! If you can think of anything else you'd like to see, or have any questions, PLEASE comment below!!!

Thanks for sticking through this whole post! : )

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