Jen Reid General

Labour Day

Happy (belated) Labour Day! This is an important day for all working people, who recognize and celebrate our collective history and power. Also a significant day for educators, for in reality it is the New Year’s Eve for the school year. 

Leading up to this, I felt a bit nervous to meet my new class, but I had set up my classroom, and had submitted my order of supplies needed. I have ordered a large number of pencils. 

This year, as with every year, I have shifted my classroom organization a bit, reflecting on what worked last year and what needed to change. I shifted the direction of my reading area, moved where I house chromebooks, and decluttered my games shelf. I also revised my Jobs board, which anchors a routine that is super important for my students and myself. 

At the start of the year, I set up a container with popsicle sticks, each with a student’s name written on it. To select their job, I pull a popsicle stick and each child comes up and puts their name beside the job they want. Students are not allowed to have the same job for more than one two-week rotation in a row, but can revisit a job that they enjoyed. The student who picks last gets to pick first the next time jobs are selected. 

The students like the approach because they get to choose the job they want and the order is random and therefore fair. Inevitably, some jobs are done well and consistently, while others are forgotten. I realized that student choice, while important, doesn’t necessarily create student responsibility. 

Hence the shift: this year, I am changing three aspects of the Jobs system. 

  1. Times of Day:  I organized the Jobs into three categories: Morning, Throughout, and End of Day. This will allow me to prompt students to complete their jobs throughout the day and week. The goal is that as the kids become more accustomed to the expectations, the reminders will diminish (and I hope disappear).
  2. Practice: I am going to spend more time reviewing and practicing each job during the first week of school. This will provide an opportunity for the class to embed the culture of responsibility and contribution into our classroom norms.
  3. Scribe: I have added a new job: scribe. At the end of the day, the scribe will record on a posted piece of chart paper one or two things that happened that day with assistance from the class. At the end of the week, I will send some of these highlights home to parents. I decided to add this job because I wanted to have more student voice reflected in my communication home, and I wanted to make visible to everyone what we are learning and accomplishing on a daily and weekly basis.

The first week of school is important: students are figuring out teacher expectations, we are all getting to know each other, and the class is starting to build a supportive community. Just like Labour Day, launching the year with a strong understanding of how contributions are made collectively to benefit the common good is essential. Our next steps as a community will be to continue that work and understanding.

Jen Reid Before School Starts, Student voice

Time for Setup

I consider myself a novice gardener. I started four or five years ago when the teacher who ran the garden club at my school moved to another school, and I realized that we needed someone to coordinate and continue the work she had started.

A fellow teacher and I worked to keep the momentum going, and I realized how amazing it is to plant and grow vegetables. This realization led me to take a look at my own very neglected yard, and I started the journey of learning how to plant and maintain a garden. This past summer as I wandered around my yard, thinking about where things should go, planting vegetables and flowers, and digging out goutweed and other invasive species, it felt akin to setting up a classroom.

My inexperience often means it takes me time to make gardening decisions: I have to really think about what I am doing and where things should go. As a seasoned teacher, my classroom setup is faster: I have years of experience knowing what works, how I might tweak things, and an understanding that the classroom will evolve over time. The school year is long, and how the space is used by students and teachers is dynamic.

I remember my first year with a classroom: I spent two weeks setting up. I put fadeproof paper with borders on every bulletin board, purchased lots of supplies at the teacher’s store that I never really used, and spent a great deal of time arranging posters and areas on bulletin boards. A few weeks into the school year, a school reorganization happened—I was moved into a different classroom and all of that work was lost. I should have spent that time hanging out in my backyard, enjoying the last gasps of summer!

Looking back, I’ve realized that whether you teach 6-year-olds or 13-year-olds, setting up a room isn’t about filling empty wall space—it’s about deliberately preparing the ground for your students to take ownership.

Here is the essential setup to focus on before day one:

Desk Layout and Learning Zones: Set up desks as well as areas of the classroom where different types of learning can occur (e.g., reading area and books, building area, games, math manipulatives). A break spot for emotional self regulation can also be very helpful.

Material Management: Label student materials (e.g., lockers, duotangs/notebooks). Determine a plan and space for students to access school supplies such as pencils, rulers, scissors, glue sticks, and markers.

Anchor Walls (Not Decor): Keep bulletin boards mostly bare. Leave room to co-create class agreements, anchor charts, and display student work as the year unfolds. Organize a space for Jobs, and determine what those jobs are.

Visual Routines: Draft a daily schedule and calendar. Using green painter’s tape directly on a board creates clean grids that keep both you and students grounded. Make daily, weekly, and monthly routines visible and editable.

First-Week Foundations: Plan the initial community-building routines and draft your day-one home communication. If you have time, set up a parent/guardian communication binder and an Occasional Teacher binder.

Think deliberately about the spaces you want, and remember that the classroom environment should be developed collaboratively with the students. A conversation about classroom agreements and learning starts on the first day and continues throughout the year, and so the walls and spaces of the classroom should reflect the students’ work and ideas. Like a garden, the students will change and grow, and the classroom space should reflect that transformation over time.