Find the Time to Straighten Your Classroom
Methods for Keeping the Classroom Straight and Clean
Dec 31, 2008
One of the jobs of the teacher is to keep the classroom straight and ready for each subsequent day of teaching. This includes picking up trash, putting desks where they belong, erasing the board, and putting things in order. This takes time, and finding time to do these basic things can sometimes be difficult for a teacher.
Times to Clean Your Room
The most obvious times to clean your room is at the end of the school day and at the beginning of the day before the students arrive. Cleaning at the end of school will enable you to leave your room straight, and keep it organized in case you end up having to call for a substitute teacher. Cleaning up at the beginning of the day before the students arrive allows you to leave earlier the day before, but it does require you to come in early.
Have the Students Clean Up
Regardless of what age you teach, you have the option of never cleaning your own room. You have somewhere between 15-30 children who are perfectly capable of cleaning up, even as young as four or five years old or as old as 18. If you have a specific place you want to have each desk left in the room, place little pieces of tape on the floor for students to know exactly where to straighten their desk to.
Playing games like mystery piece of trash will get all the students involved in the clean-up process. The mystery piece of trash is the one piece of trash that you spy out and whichever student finds and cleans that piece of trash up, gets a small prize. You can also play a timed cleaning game, where you see how much the room can be straightened in 5 minutes. The benefit of this is that your room gets cleaned up fast, and your students enjoy an extra recess or free time to play.
Have your students in charge of straightening the library, clean the chalk boards, pick up trash, and alphabetize their homework for you to grade. Students can also sharpen pencils and do and any other job that you regularly do that they are capable of completing.This will help teach the students to take more responsibility for the classroom.
Finding the time to clean up your room may be as simple as taking 10 minutes at the end of each day before dismissal to have the students help. If you prefer not to have your students help clean up, you can find time before the students arrive, or at the end of the day for the necessary straightening that needs done.
Learn more organization and time management tips as well as other tips for teachers.
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