Art Room Organizational Superstar!

Ok, I am pretty far from an organizational superstar (as anyone might peeked at the detritus in my school bag has discovered) but I have once again moved art rooms and in the spirit of new beginnings, I'll share a few new things I've put in place.

#1: Three tables instead of six I've got the Keith Haring Table (yellow), the Yayoi Kusama table (red) and the Rene Margritte table (blue.)  Each "table" is actually three tables pushed together.  Much easier than a million different table names.  I also like the way having both a color and artist differentiate for my very mixed bag of kiddos-- the higher level kids latch on to the artist name and the sample work they see, the ELL/SEN kids tend to just rely on remembering the color.


#2 Each class shelf is divided up by table AND class.  A small piece of colored tape on their class shelf shows the red table sketchbook collector where their stuff goes.  I can choose one person from the red table to hand out sketchbooks for their little group-- it's a lot faster to hand out 6 sketchbooks to people sitting together than 20  people scattered all around the room.  Not sure why I didn't do this 10 years ago!



#3 Seating chart on clip board sticky back velcroed right next to the class shelf.  I just discovered sticky backed velcro last year, it's amazing stuff.  Each table is has 3 pieces of work by an artist taped to the top. So little Johnny (or Mohammed in my case) can immediately see that he not only sits at the big blue Renee Margritte table, but at the painting taped to his individual table top has a large green apple on it.  This is also reflected on my seating chart, with the names written in pencil so I can move kids around as necessary.  A sub can find the seating chart and class shelves easily.


#4 Tags for the drying rack Last year I started marking off territory on the drying rack with colored masking tape and asking kids to do things like, "put your painting above the blue line."  This year I am finding my 3rd graders have problems with even that....  So, I laminated a paper with each class code on it and stuck it to a few popsicle sticks.  The idea is that I'll remember to label real estate for each class when it's their time to hit the drying rack and I can pop then in and out as needed.


That's all for now, kids are hard at work on Haring Style sketchbook covers which I will share shortly!

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