Setting Up the Middle Grades Classroom

This is a biggie. One reason why I love middle school is that the responsibility of completing classwork, getting work missed, etc. falls on the STUDENT. Not me. The STUDENT. So when someone is absent, it is his/her responsibility to get missing work. We use an online platform, and I post what we are doing in class. However, if a student does not have access to a printer or a computer at home (which families can actually check out a laptop from our media center and get a broadband card for free so they do have the needed technology at home), or their Internet “broke” (which is an excuse I hear…a lot….) I need a place to neatly keep missing assignments so students can get it on their own without asking me.

Even though I teach middle school, I am going to have a word wall in my room. It’s a non-negotiable. This year my word wall will consist of social studies vocabulary because there is a LOT of content-specific words in the curriculum. I created my own word cards, and I  put a visual representation on each card to help students make connections as well as the definition. *You can check out this word wall by clicking {HERE}*

When I taught ELA, I had a Greek and Latin roots/affixes word wall. There are SO many students are responsible for learning, and I found that they were forgetting already learned ones. I created a word wall specifically for students to refer to all year long. I put this word wall on a bulletin board. During the year, students would write words that contained a specific root/affix on a notecard and then tack onto the board under the word wall card. Students were on the lookout for roots/affixes without me having to ask! You can also use this word wall during science because several vocabulary terms have these roots/affixes. My students were referring to my word wall to remember key science terms! You can see this word wall by clicking {HERE}.

Maps, maps, maps…..and more maps. I will be teaching Europe, Canada, Australia, Latin America, and islands in the Caribbean. We are literally all over the world. So I will be hanging up a lot of maps in my room. Good thing I love maps 🙂 I have had a lot of people ask where I bought the large world map from, so I added two shower curtain maps to my Amazon store. One map is the one you see in the photos, and the other is one I think I will buy once my current one bites the dust because it has lines of latitude and longitude on it!

Even middle schoolers like to have their work hanging on the wall! I don’t have wall space outside my classroom (darn those lockers!), nor do I have wall space for 150 kiddos. I can, though, have a dedicated space on my wall and rotate out student work, so they know I appreciate and respect what they create. And, even though they may not admit it, they are proud when they know their work is important enough to display.

I love quotes. When I coached basketball years ago, there were 2 girls responsible for finding a quote to read to the team before our game. They had to explain the significance of the quote and how it pertained to our team and the upcoming game. It was amazing to hear the message my players heard from those quotes and the impact it made on them. So I knew I wanted a wall space for quotes for my middle schoolers. I also decided that since there are specific people I will be teaching, most of the quotes will be said by those people (yet another on-going project for myself this year!). Not only will these quotes hopefully give my students something to think about, but the quotes will also help my students remember the significance of each person.

I will be using an interactive notebook this year. There is SO much content I will be teaching, I have to make the material engaging for my students. I will do this through INB and projects. I need a place where I can display our INB table of contents so if students are absent or get behind, they can see what they missed and what they need to make up. This won’t take up much space at all either…thank goodness!

I love word splashes. I consider a word splash to be a group of words associated with one term. Because we will be studying 5 different areas, I want to help my students recognize key terms associated with each area. I need a large enough area to display the current splash as well as previous splashes (and I really need to think of a cuter name). I am going to color code each region’s splash because color can help some students with remembering word associations.

We are a Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT) district. Our kids come to school with different types of devices. I know they use Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I am going to bring those social media platforms into my classroom. I need a space where I can have an interactive bulletin board that the students will be responsible for updating. I have several ideas floating around in my head, but until the school year gets going, I am not sure which path I will take. As soon as I figure it out though, I will be blogging about it on my blog, so be sure to check in with me regularly!

I love trivia. And I love to know what happened today in history. This will be another interactive display my students will be responsible for updating. It won’t need much room, but I do want a space where students can easily switch out events that happened in history, and I hope they find really obscure or interesting, little known facts! I just want them to become fascinated by history because I did NOT like social studies when I was in school. AT ALL. I am trying to think of things that would have helped pique my interest in hopes that it carries over to my students. I wrote a blog post dedicated to this project, and you can read about it {HERE}. Oh, and you can download (for free!) everything you need to do this project in your own classroom 🙂

I guess this is important 🙂 I do not like desks. Nope nope nope. These are the adjoined chair and desk, and they are so cumbersome! I like to have my students sit in groups, and those desks would move all over the room! They drove me crazy. I wasn’t keen on the idea at the beginning of last year, but thought I would give them a try. I nixed that the 3rd week of school. So, over the span of several months, I replaced desks with tables. Now I have 6 rectangular tables and 1 circle table for my students. Not only do these tables not migrate, I have way more space than if I had 30+ desks. I want my students to get on the floor and spread out and easily do group work. Tables allow me to have extra space in the room.

Lighting

I noticed two years ago that when school started back, I started to get really bad headaches. This had never happened before, so I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. On the weekends and during breaks, my daily headaches went away. I finally figured out that it was because of the overhead lights. Luckily, we are able to have lamps in our classrooms and patio lights that are outdoor grade (and if we need an extension cord, it has to be outdoor grade, too). I went straight away to Target and bought lamps and patio lights. I wanted enough so that I could not have my overhead lights on at all. We can’t have the lamps and lights on for a long time period a day, so I kept an ear to the ground to know when our fire inspector was in our building 🙂 My headaches went away, and my students would comment on how soothing and peaceful our room was. Anytime I had to be out, the sub would have the overhead lights on, and when I returned my students would complain about the bright lights they had to endure 🙂