Raney's Rock Stars: New Space: A Classroom Makeover

After reading a very enlightening Education article about the use of space within a classroom and how to maximize student productivity, I decided to give the classroom a makeover. Yesterday, I informed students about what was to come and they seemed very excited about the shift. Each student had to clean out their desks, organize their folders and pack their pencil bins because the desks were being taken out the classroom...as well as many of the chairs.

Early this morning, I met up with our school's custodian and went to work. He brought in two more rectangular tables and one round table. We created two low tables, where students can sit on pillows, core disks or kneel. Another table was raised, creating a standing table. Lastly, the circle table was lowered a bit to make it the perfect height for sitting balls to be used as their seats. By 7:55 am I was elated and completely filled with nervous energy. With change comes adjustment, and I eagerly hoped my students were up for this.

As students entered the room, they chose a ticket out of a basket. This ticket guided them to where they would be sitting for Morning Work. Immediately, students were expressing their excitement over the changes of the classroom. One child came up and said, "Thank you for doing this for us!" It was a magical moment.

Throughout the day, students continued to choose from the basket, and got to experience the various learning spaces available to them. In the afternoon, we took a guided tour of our classroom, stopping to explain and model what the expected behavior was for each of the learning spaces. We took several pictures and will use those pictures as reminder posters in each space.

All and all, it was a fabulous day. We experienced some bumps today, as I'm sure we will experience more as we get more settled in but it was a great day. I hope many of you heard about these changes from your children tonight. Here are some pictures from today: