Ep 69: Preparing Your Classroom for Summer Vacation: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
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Hey, teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael, and I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Hey there! Welcome to another episode of The Classroom Commute Podcast, I'm Rachael your host. Thanks for joining me today. I've got a really quick bite sized episode for you. It's going to be packed with action and a freebie so stick around and I will let you know all about it. I actually recorded this episode last year around this time. It was right before the pandemic dropped, everything went out the window, and we had to rethink everything. The reason I wasn't able to release this episode last year was because it was all about how to have your students help you clean up your classroom for the end of the school year. Well, it was no longer a valid episode because nobody was in the classroom. So, let's 'take two' and try this again. Now, I know not everybody is back in the classroom yet this year, and that's okay. This is going to be an episode that you're going to tuck away in your teacher vault and you're going to snag the freebie that I'll be talking about in a minute and you'll take it away for next year. For those of you who are in the classroom this year, it's going to be a great episode for you to take action on.
In today's episode, I want to give you some clear ways that you can have your students participate and help you to clean up your classroom at the end of the school year so that you are not left with all of the tasks yourself. There's nothing worse than having your students leave on that last day of school, only to look around your classroom and see an endless To-Do list that needs to be checked off before you can officially open the doors to summer break. Now, I know not everybody finishes their school year in May. If you're like me, in New York, we don't finish until the end of June but it's something that you're going to want to start thinking about and maybe having your students do a little at a time. If you are ending in the next few weeks, then this episode couldn't come at a better time. If you're not listening to this at the time of its recording, these are cleaning tasks that your students can do all year long to help maintain your classroom.
Now, as a recovering perfectionist, when it comes to my classroom, I know how hard it is to allow someone, let alone a 9, 10, 11 year old, to come in and help you organize your classroom. It's really hard to release that responsibility onto your students. However, I've also learned that being the last teacher to hang up your keys for the summer is a bit painful as well. I've learned to loosen the ropes a little bit and enlist students help when it comes to packing up the classroom for the year. Like I just mentioned, these are also tasks that you can do throughout the year so that you aren't always having to do one big sweep at the end of the year. And you know what? The results are surprisingly successful. It turns out that students love the responsibility of boxing up your room for the year or before a long break or even before the weekend to help you tidy up a bit. If the thought of doing this with your students makes you cringe just a little bit, I mean, what if they do put the poetry books in with the science fiction books? What are we going to do about that? I do want to encourage you to consider letting your students help you with just a few tasks that will lighten your end of the year load a bit.
I've got a couple of tips before you actually let your students loose in the classroom. I first suggest that you take pictures, especially if you're doing this at the end of the year. This is going to help you in the long run. If you want to remember how everything was organized or how things looked up on the wall, be sure to snap a few pictures to refer to when you go to put your classroom back together in the fall, or even if you're going to be setting up a whole new room somewhere else, it'll be really helpful for you to have those pictures to refer to. We think we're going to remember how a bulletin board looks or how we liked certain things organized but we forget, especially if you're moving to a new space. Snapping a few pictures is really going to be helpful to refer to and help make that set up process so much faster. Next, you want to set your expectations for cleaning your classroom. Come on, you knew I was going to bring this up. I love talking about routines and procedures, behavior expectations and all of those things because they are so valuable to having things run smoothly in your classroom. You have to make sure that you carefully model exactly how each task is to be completed. Let your students know what they should do if they run into an issue or maybe you want to give your students a step by step checklist of what they need to be doing and in what order. Along with your task checklist, you might even want to create task baskets where you place all the materials that they'll need for a specific cleaning and organizing task. You know, things like cleaning products, paper towels, erasers, or whatever they might need for their particular task. Then when you go to delegate the tasks, you hand them their checklist, you hand them their basket full of their cleaning supplies and you send them on their way, after you've gone over the expectations, of course. To make this actually easier for you, I have put together several cleaning task slips that you can print, cut out, and give to your students. It makes it really simple for your students to know what to do. One cleaning task on the list might include discarding broken crayons or unusable crayons, you would give that to a student and send them on their way. Another task list might be to organize and sort crayons, markers, colored pencils by color, if you are like me and you like to have color coded things. Maybe you give them a ziplock baggie to store them for the summer. Another student's job might be to test markers to make sure that they have enough ink or get rid of ones that don't. Another task might be to wash tables or desks, inside and out, in chairs, cabinets, and shelves. They would get their task list with those specific possibilities listed out and then you would give them their basket with the supplies that they will need to complete that task. There's a lot of little things like this that students can do for you that saves you time at the end of the year.
In the freebie that you can download, I actually have this task list in two forms. I have the individual task lists that you can give to your students. These are those printable, cut them out, give them to your students and send them on their way. Then I also have a master checklist so that you can actually keep track of what tasks have been done and you can check them off as students complete them. Also in the freebie, I have a list of some cleaning supplies that you might want to have on hand as well that will help you and your students complete each task. That's just a nice checklist for you to have in case you need to kind of take inventory in your classroom, go shopping, and do whatever you need to do. If you want access to that, just head over to the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/69 and I'll have that link for you to download the task cards, the checklist and everything that you need.
Now here's a quick bonus tip, if this is something that you think would be helpful to do throughout the year and not just at the end of the year, go ahead and print out these task lists, laminate them, and put them on a little ring. Throughout the year, you can pull out the ring and divvy out the tasks to the students so that this isn't just a giant thing at the end of the school year that you're doing, but rather it's something that you're keeping up with and maintaining as you go through the school year. That's just a quick tip to help keep you organized throughout the year. If by chance you're catching this episode later or if you want to set yourself up for success coming up in the next school year, have these ready to go so you can do these cleaning tasks throughout the school year.
That's it, I told you it was going to be a bite sized episode today. We are all running out of mental space to take on new information anyways so I wanted to make it short and sweet for you. Make sure you head over to the show notes, grab those free task lists and checklists and you'll be on your way. Hopefully it will help you shave off some valuable time so you can get on your way to your summer vacation and not be the last teacher to turn in your keys.
All right, that's all I have for you today. I hope you have a great rest of your week. I will be back again next week with another episode. Bye for now.
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