A Classroom Teardown Tip I Came Across Today

How do we keep kids focused all the way until the end of the year?

I think after testing is over, it's kind of natural that students start to lose focus and feel like they're ready for summer, even if we have a couple of weeks of school left.

I think one of the things that we can do is make sure that kids stay busy and make sure they get the message from us that school is still in session and we are still here to learn.

So I was really excited to come across this article from Angela Watson today.

You can find this at principalcenter.com slash deconstruct.

I made a shortcut for you, or you can just Google it.

It's at the Truth for Teachers blog by Angela Watson.

And this is called Four Steps to Deconstructing Your Classroom in One Day.

And she says basically here, you don't wanna start breaking down your classroom, taking everything off the walls and cleaning up and moving furniture and everything until like the second to last day of school.

Because if you start that like a week early or two weeks early, it kind of amplifies that, you know, summer is just around the corner effect.

You know, it kind of worsens the sense that students are just done.

You know, it gives them the sense that it's okay to be done.

So I thought this was pretty insightful.

She says, make tearing down your room the last thing you do, but start doing the less visible stuff sooner.

And then she has some systems and checklists and stuff for getting the classroom ready without kind of ruining it before the very end of the year.

And she also says, and I think this is a super good point, like you do not have to do all this yourself.

Like it's totally appropriate to involve your students in shutting down the classroom for the year.

And I just thought that was an especially good article on how to involve students in that without giving them the sense that like school's out day after tomorrow, or like you can give up the day after tomorrow, even though we have like three or four or five weeks of school left.

Let me know what you think about that.

Principalcenter.com slash deconstruct is the link.

And I definitely want to encourage you to check out Angela's Truth for Teachers blog.

She has a program called the 40-Hour Teacher Workweek, which even if you don't ever learn anything more about it than that, I love the idea of a 40-hour workweek because That actually sounds doable.

I don't know how you feel about that.

She gets a lot of pushback on that, even that idea that you could have a 40-hour work week.

But I think that's something really admirable to strive for and really healthy to strive for.

So check out Angela's blog.

Again, it is truthforteachers.com, and that article is on breaking down the classroom.

Let me know what you think about that.

It's good stuff.