Art Room Organization

Yesterday, I left off thinking about the room organization so I wanted to go back to Choices without Chaos and go to the chapter on classroom and center set up. Centers usually accommodate materials that are often used together. This is really important to me as making the centers and observing students in them is [at this point] part of what I'm doing for my Capstone project. Some of the best tips and tricks for organization I found were:

1. Clean out and sort EVERYTHING. I remember when I first walked into my classroom three years ago, what a mess. It was a dumping ground for everything every one thought could be used for an art project. I spent hourssss cleaning it up and it seems like it is time to do that again. I need to purge and I hope that I can start doing that soon.

2. LABEL everything. Also, dont just label the thing, label the spot where it lives so that students can return it to exactly where it belongs. This behavior of returning things to where they found it is essential in a choice-based learning environment.

3. To store common materials like pencils, erasers, scissors and glue at every center or make a central location for it all? I'm not sure on this one. I think that some centers will require it and some will not. I recently read on another blog deepspacesparkle.com to ban pencils and erasers because they cause second guessing. I will agree and disagree with that because in some areas I think they need it. In centers like painting I dont think I will allow them because then they spend too much time marking up the canvas with pencil and not thinking about paint application and techniques.

In the drawing center [Chapter 4] explanation Bedrick discusses how she opens with the drawing center. I plan to do the same and simulate a full choice approach by placing different drawing materials on each table: Crayons & Colored Pencils, Markers, Pastels, Charcoal and I'll see if I can round up anything else in my classroom (would it be too soon for pen and ink?). I am planning on uploading some before and after pictures and I think the changes will be obvious. I think this will help students see how the choice classroom functions and get them used to having options. I was thinking that in order to encourage movement between stations I could create an activity with songs, where a song is played the members work in that material and when the song ends they clean up and move to another, then another song begins. Of course with songs that are current and appealing to middle school aged members. This will also get the members in the habit of cleaning up before they move to something new.

I have started to collect odd and ends and containers to be able to sort everything and display it in a user friendly way. After thinking about the design of the room, I've got to start thinking about how I'm going to display information about the materials.

That is all for now.