Ep 118 - Getting Your Classroom Ready for Summer (FASTER!)
Inside This Week’s Episode: — When summer vacation finally arrives, the LAST thing you want to do is have to clean and organize your classroom to ready it for summer. Learn how your students can actually help you box up, wrap up, and tidy up your classroom so that you can get to summer faster!
Links & Resources Mentioned in the Episode
Grab my FREE Classroom Clean-Up Tasks below:
FREE CLASSROOM CLEAN-UP TASKS
Don't take on the huge task of keeping your classroom clean all by yourself!
Allow your students to pitch in and as a result, they will take ownership of the way their classroom looks and YOU will save yourself a ton of time! These simple task slips make it easy to delegate age-appropriate cleaning tasks that students can help out with!
THERE’S ALWAYS SO MUCH TO DO BEFORE SUMMER VACATION.
Before you can turn in your classroom keys for the summer you likely have paperwork to complete, reorganizing your classroom cabinets, closets, and drawers —all those things that got in disarray in the thick of the school year.
And if you’ve ever been that last teacher out the door sailing off into summer vacay mode - then you know how painful it can be! (Trust me - I’ve been there more times than I care to count!)
So, let’s not let it happen again, mmmk?
What if you could be the FIRST teacher checkin’ out for the summer? What if you had your classroom, cleaned, prepped, organized, and ready for custodial approval ….EARLY?
Sounds lovely.
The secret to making it all happen? Don’t do it all yourself! Instead of waiting till your students leave on that last day of school to get your classroom in order, enlist the help of your students to get it done FASTER! And you know what - students actually LOVE to help you clean and organize your classroom. It’s a win-win.
Now, before you start passing out garbage bags, sponges, and cleaning sprays - you need to have a METHOD to the madness. And that’s what this episode is all about. I’ll show you exactly how I successfully and methodically had my students help me prepare my classroom for the summer.
READY FOR A QUICKER WAY TO SUMMER VACATION?
Quick tips from the Episode:
It can be hard to release some of the responsibility of preparing your classroom for summer to your students, however, the benefits can be huge - allowing you to get to your summer vacation faster! Consider letting your students help you with just a few tasks that will lighten your end of the year load a bit.
When having your students help you take down things like wall displays, bulletin board sets, etc… it helps to first take pictures of what you want it to look like when it goes back up in the fall. Snapping a few pictures is really going to be helpful to refer to and help make that set up process in the fall so much faster.
Set your expectations for cleaning your classroom. You have to make sure that you carefully model exactly how each task is to be completed. Let your students know what they should do if they run into an issue. You can give your students a step-by-step checklist of what they need to be doing and in what order.
Create task baskets where you place all the materials that they'll need for a specific cleaning and organizing task. The basket will include cleaning products, paper towels, erasers, whatever they might need for their particular task. Then when you go to delegate the tasks, you hand them their checklist and their basket full of their cleaning supplies and send them on their way
REVIEW & SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLASSROOM COMMUTE PODCAST
Don’t miss a single episode. Subscribe to the podcast and you’ll get notified each week when a new episode gets dropped! And - if you love what you hear, I’d be so honored if you took a quick moment to rate and review the podcast so that other awesome teachers can find the podcast!