Setting Up My Classroom, part 3: Architect Dan Moves Furniture

Today I finally was able to take a break from organizing materials to conquer a big job--moving furniture. As you may have noticed in my "before" pictures, the custodians had just shoved all the furniture back into the room wherever they wanted to put it, without much thought as to where the teacher might want it (as a side note, we are in the process of hiring a new site manager, and one guy who is up for the job and currently helping around the building said he was shocked to see that done--he says if he gets the job, he will have teachers map out where they would like their furniture to be before they leave for the summer, and after they are done waxing floors and whatnot, he and his team would put the furniture where the teacher requests it. So, here's hoping he gets the job!). This was not a task I could conquer on my own, so I recruited the services of Architect Dan since he would be able to give me some ideas of where he thought furniture might work best.

Here are some pictures of what we came up with. Please excuse the mess, as I'm still in the process of organizing and storing materials.

Architect Dan sits at the small group table. This is in the corner close to the teacher's desk.

Architect Dan sits at one of the student tables, near my "science inquiry table." I am using four tables in my classroom, each which will seat 6 students. The small desk with the red chair is a special desk for the Star Student of the week.

Architect Dan calls on an imaginary student in the whole-group instruction area/classroom library. We chose this space for whole group instruction since the SMART Board is mounted here. After this picture was taken, we did end up moving one of the grey bookshelves that are stacked in the corner so that it is more at student level. We also used some of the bookshelves as makeshift partitions to create a cozy space for the class and for students to work in independently. (The giant black and white boxes will be gone soon--those are science modules I need to deliver to other classrooms).

Architect Dan sits on the reflection desk (also known as time out). He thinks I should put a dunce cap there. I explained that people don't do that anymore. Here you can also see the fourth student table. There is also a small grey table in this picture, but we ended up moving that next to the computer table, where hopefully I will not run into it this year.

Obviously, I'm not finished and still have things to put away. I am getting rid of a lot of stuff, some of which I didn't even know I had, but just had inherited from previous teachers, and some of it was pretty dated. Our favorite find was a record (yes, a record!) that was still in its shrink wrap and supposedly contained music that will "get kids moving!" The back included a quote from and a photo of Scott Baio. Obviously, I won't be using that in my classroom!

Do you like what you see so far in the pictures? Is there anything you think I might do differently?