Making Improvements: One Day at a Time

I spent the last two days in my classroom organizing some centers and cleaning up the mess left over from Saturday's festivities. I'm pretty excited about the progress I've made. I feel like I have a much better understanding The Creative Curriculum, and that is helping me design my classroom with more clarity.

My biggest concern about my classroom last year was about how much open space I had. Now, I didn't mind this too much, but I did notice the kids seemed to wander a lot. This often lead to running and all sorts of craziness. By itself it wasn't horrible, but when other kids were trying to build tall towers or focus on a quieter activity, these crazy running bursts were distracting and often destructive.

I managed to turn my classroom into decent centers today! I've rearranged the room two times now this summer, and I think I've finally discovered an arrangement I like.

I started by organizing my Toys and Games center. After reading the chapter on it in The Creative Curriculum, I took everything off my shelves and put them into four piles: self-correcting toys (toys with a clear-cut way to go together), open-ended toys (toys with no right or wrong way to use them), collections (items that are open-ended and share commonalities), and cooperative toys (games children play together).

I realized I had about a million toys in that center! Way too much - no wonder the center was always a mess! I ended up choosing only 4-5 toys from each category to put back on the shelf. When I head back up there next week, I plan to label the shelves and the baskets like I did in the block center to make clean up easy for the kids.

Here's the finished center:

I'm loving that I have a table in the center this year. Last year, the kids took the toys wherever they wanted...It was a mess.

On the top of this side of the shelf are my collections. (Although, really, I think these collections belong in Discovery. It's all I have right now though.) Below are the open-ended toys - teddy bears, pegs and pegboards, links, beads, alphabet blocks, and magnetic letters. The self-help frames on the bottom right are actually self-correcting toys, but this was the only place I could fit them.

On this side of the shelf are my self-correcting toys and my cooperative games. The self-correcting toys are on the top - nesting cups, shape stackers, shape box, puzzles, and color pegboard. The cooperative games are on the bottom.

Pretty cool, huh? I'm not sure how well I'm meeting the requirements of The Creative Curriculum, but I feel better about it now than I did.

I moved to my art center after I finished Toys and Games. Last year, I planned art activities for the kids. They were normally process art projects, but I told them what supplies they could use and most of the kids were working on the same project at the same time. I want to have a more open-ended art center next year: a place where kids can go to exhibit their creativity whatever way they choose.

Here's what my art center looked like before (please don't laugh....):

Pretty awful... No wonder the kids never used it the way I wanted them to. After studying the chapter on Art in The Creative Curriculum and a quick trip to the dollar store in town, this is what my art center looks like now:
I added painting supplies (paint shirts, paintbrushes, paint, tins to put paint on, and sponges), play dough and play dough tools, collage materials, glue, markers, crayons, colored pencils, pencils, paper, and yarn.

I'm pretty excited about the possibilities here! Allowing the kids the freedom to do art at their own will - so exciting!