Wall displays

Last week I decided update one of my wall displays. I had a brilliant idea at about 5 o'clock (which soon turned into 6:30). We are making connections with New Zealand by looking at the New Zealand natural environment. I decided to make an interactive display for the children to go up to, touch and explore. Here is what I came up with:

So far the response from the children has been good.  They enjoyed reading the books, solving the Weka mazes and the New Zealand map puzzle. I am wondering though how long this will last. How often should we update our walls and displays to keep our classrooms fresh and exciting? How do we balance that with the time we have left?

Spaces so far - the good, the bad and the ugly

Last week I wrote about my new spaces that I created in my room. Today I thought that I would write about what I'm experiencing so far...

I'm finding that we had a great start at the beginning of last week. However, we have had a disruption to the flow and my kids have come back with some interesting behaviours. What I found on Friday last week and so far this week is quite far from what I had hoped. So here is what I'm thinking we need to do!

• Revisit our rules - what are OUR expectations from both myself and the students? What do the children want from these spaces? How do they expect their peers to act in the different areas we have?
• I think I need to be clear that choices will be given to those who have earned that right. I may need to set up some spaces for kids who may need to go and work on their own if they are not managing themselves. 
• Speaking of Managing self. I will revisit what this is and discuss what managing self means to us. What should we see when people are managing them selves? How can we help those who are having trouble with this? 

So that's the plan to getting back on track. What do you do when your students are having trouble making wise choices?

On a positive note. Our new classroom space has really worked for some of my students. They are focused and are using our different spaces wisely. They are discussing their work, moving around to find the space that best fits the task they are working on and most importantly they are achieving great results. So now I need to make sure that all my kids are using their space to extend themselves. 

Changes on the horizon!

Feeling inspired by the amazing speakers I listened to last week during the "It's a Learners World" conference, I decided to make some changes to my class. The furniture was rearranged, bits and pieces bought, assembled and placed around the room. So far I have only seen amazing things from my kids. The first step I implemented was create a few spaces in my class that the kids could go to get away and work on their own. Firstly I put some mosquito nets up. These are now our CAVE spaces. When they go in, they have to work independently.

Our couch became our Mountain Top/Campfire space. The couch is in front of the interactive white board. I thought that this way the children can share their work with each other using the IWB (so far we found out that we can fit 10 kids on the couch).

The back of the couch doubles as a sitting space also.

We also have some round tables set up as Campfire spaces. There we work in a group. Another big success was our sandpit space. This is our practical working area. We have already used this to demonstrate how magma seeps through tectonic plates.

My class has really enjoyed our new spaces. On a number of occasions this week they were so engrossed in what they were doing that they didn't rush of on the bell. This is what I observed earlier in the week. 

Exciting!!!