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Home : 2001 : June : 26
>6th grade language arts teacher and >I'm looking around my totally empty >room and starting to feel overwhelmed. > >Someone PLEASE tell me, what is the >FIRST thing I
give you insight. If you are in a self-contained classroom you will want to think about how best to arrange furniture in order to accommodate learning activities for all subjects, with particular attention to cooperative learning times. For myself, during the first week or so of school, I found it easiest to set up the desks in old-fashioned rows until I could get a handle on the group dynamics. Since I had over 100 students among 4 sections, it took some problem-solving on my part in order to facilitate classroom management. The energy level and hormones of 6th graders will keep you on your toes, so you will need to figure out how to achieve the maximum amount of learning with the least amount of stress for you. Believe me when I say that you DO NOT want to spend the bulk of your instructional time trying to keep Johnnie and Suzie from flirting or Bobby and Matthew form analyzing yesterday's football practice!!! LOL With regard to room decoration, if you are in a finacial position to do so, there are a number of really good language arts posters and other bulletin board sets available in catalogues and at teachers' supply stores. These contain parts of speech, puntuation rules, paragraph structure, grammar rules, etc. If you can't afford to buy these, make your own and leave up around the classroom year round for student referral during class. Always laminate your decorations if you have a machine available so that you don't have to spend time, money and effort reproducing them in the years to come. You may want to start gathering these materials now, as well as any seasonal decorations for the Fall because they probably will not be as readily available in August as the start of school approaches. If you purchase bulletin board borders, try to get fairly generic ones. Although, holiday-themed and single purpose ones are eye-catching, the need to change them frequently loses its charm pretty quickly. The same is true of background paper on the bulletin boards. I found that neutral colors that suited a number of purposes were a great time saver. With regard to planning lessons, try and get a copy of the district curriculum guides, teacher's manuals, and student materials to look through at you leisure. If you will be teaching Reading as well, and you will use literature or trade books, get copies of these as well so that you will have an idea how to pace yourself for the year. In most of the districts in my state (Massachusetts) there is a strong push on written communication skills, so it's a good idea to plan out how you want to structure your writing units to provide the best skill-building opportunities for the students for a logical progression of achievement. Factor in plenty of high-interest assignments that the kids can relate to their own lives and experiences. You can tie these into seasonal and current events. One really successful assignment I gave at the very beginning of the year was on a day when we were dismissed early due to the approach of a hurricane. I told the kids to pretend that they were TV news reporters and to describe what the scene looked like as the storm progressed and to interview members of their households for "man-on-the street" reactions to the events. the next day, the kids shared their news reports with the class. Good luck and remember to have fun. Although 6th grade can be a real challenge, it's one of my favorite places to teach.
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