Classroom Tour - Middle School Edition

hello everybody my name is Latonya welcome back to my channel smarty style today's video is going to be a classroom tour video if you are subscriber or have been following me for a long time this is a little bit overdue I actually just completed my very first week of school for the 2019 2020 school year and this video is actually supposed to be uploaded just before the first day of school but life got the best of me and this is delayed so if you are new to my channel just to give you some quick background I am going to be heading into my 15th year or I am in my 15th year of teaching now the school year started with the 2019 2020 school year and my whole professional life in terms of teaching I have only taught elementary school I've taught third fourth and fifth and this school year I took the jump and decided to transition to middle school so this year I will be t earth why not I will be teaching I am teaching eighth grade social studies language arts and with the transition from elementary to middle school that meant obviously that I had to move classrooms because I'm at a whole new school which then meant I had to set up a brand new classroom so I have documented that whole process in vlogs that hopefully you've seen by now and if not after this you can go back and see the whole process it took me to set this up or if you just want to watch just for the final product this video is made just for you so just for the front of it and out of curiosity's sake throughout this whole set of process I did tracked the number of hours it took me to do this and right now give or take you know 30 minutes here there this whole process of me setting up this classroom took about 42 hours and 30 minutes that is with a lot of help if you saw my blogs leading up to this you know I had friends and family helped me out so I can't even imagine how many hours it would have taken me had I've done this all alone so I'm not going to be talking to too much more I'm going to jump right into the classroom tour and I hope that you guys enjoy it if you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section if you just generally enjoy a classroom tour videos or you happen to like this one in particular please do give this video a thumbs up and then quick disclaimer if you are a brand-new teacher this is not necessarily something I think you should aspire to your first year of teaching this is not what my classroom looked like my very first year I did not have the means nor the brain space to even put this this amount of time into just setting up the classroom because I was very focused on just being prepared as a teacher so with that being said I hope you guys enjoy the tour and I'll see you in the next video or maybe you'll come back for an outro anyway I hope you guys enjoy the tour alrighty so here we are we are standing at the front door so when you first walk into the classroom this is going to be what you see so I will do a full sand of the whole room and then I'll go by each area and kind of give a little bit of information or my thought process as to what I did and why I did it so this is the whole classroom in its entirety again I teach eighth grade social studies language arts right now and my two main class is my homeroom and my switch class is what we call them here I have about 26 students each which I know I am very lucky to have that's not necessarily the norm but that's what I'm working with this year so that's the room in general I'm gonna turn here to my right and at the right this is what you see when you walk in and turn to the right obviously so for me next to the door I always like to have this kind of functional space so this black item right here this is just my Chromebook charging cart I am NOT going to open that and show you what it looks like inside because that is a project that me and a couple of students need to take care of and then on top of my charging cart is just a plant for decorative purposes obviously and then a cup that says you're the best in class that was actually a student gift that is housing some writing utensils because when I have the time I'm going to be adding my bathroom check-in and check-out sheets so that's what that little clipboard is there for the gold basket they are just holding some emergency information if we have an emergency or when we have drills and then behind that this is a picture holder that I got from the target dollar spot a couple years ago I do have one of those little Polaroid cameras and I typically will put pictures in there and then this sign here is from Hobby Lobby I got that a couple years ago and it was in my last classroom and speaking of which if you've been following me for a few years you'll notice that this class is almost a complete replica of my last class my goal really was to not break the budget by trying to come up with a whole new scheme but to just give this one some updated looks now that I'm dealing with older students so instead of having more yellow in the classroom I try to add an accents of gold just to give it that more modern touch and the kids seem to like it one of the students I had or I have described me as having a modern aesthetic based on the decorations in my classroom so I feel like mission accomplished my favorite thing in this corner is this neon sign that I got from Target that just says do good because I do want to spread just like positive messages to the students and I do want them to think about what they're going to do not not just in the present time but going forward to contribute good to society as opposed to negative and then this is some more decorative items from Target I got that a couple years ago at Target and another picture holder again from the dollar spot then when you turn here these are some of my other favorite items these three signs that you see were handmade by a friend of mine who I became friends with because I had her son when he was in fourth grade and he has since graduated from high school and then she had a younger daughter that was not in my class in fifth grade but was in my friend Liza's class and then obviously if he no lies and I we are attached at the hip so any student of Liza's was a student of mine and so we've just maintained our friendship over the years so she made those signs those are our three school rules be respectful be responsible be safe the BU sign also came from Target as well as the love to learn sign this little feather holder or tea holder is from five below got that a couple years ago and then these signs here are new additions I got these I think they're called VIP passes and they do make specific hall passes for teachers I can leave the link in the description box you can let them know what you want them to say so I have ones that say ha these all say speech then these say nurse and office and if you know me once I have a scheme if I can find things to match I'm definitely going to do that so I love those you get 20 of them not 20 of them I think you get 12 of them for about $20 so very reasonably priced over here this is my not necessarily white writing wall but just student work display wall so again my last classroom I had a wall very similar to this the only difference was the scrapbook paper instead of being like touches of gold they were based on yellow so I pop I bought excuse me six different patterns I think yeah so there's a marble pattern a gold pattern a gold stripe pattern a gold polka-dotted pattern a plain white pattern and a marble pattern and then we refer to this one as baby polka-dots when we were putting it together so the goal for this wall is for it to be haphazardly organized or intentionally randomized so we did want to make sure that it looked scattered about but also had some kind of a pattern so this was the wall that I was most dreading because you have to be very precise to make sure it's straight and again my friend Liza my friend Marty and her daughters Sophie and Alena helped me with this one night and these little clips were also made by the mom that made the signs so these are just close pins that have been painted white with ribbon hot glue gun on front and then can you see that there's thumbtacks that she hot glue the clips on and then you just push the thumbtacks into the wall and it just makes putting student work easy you clip it in there and then when you want to switch it out all I have to do is like snatch the paper down and then it comes out so that is my student display wall this weekend I'm hoping to go to cm and just get some labels so that I can label this side home rooms they know this is homeroom students and down the middle I would put the word switch so they know that that work over there are my switch students those of you that saw my blog this is how I'm covering that water spot is I've put my rolling white board there if you don't know and if you didn't see the vlogs the cleaning the people that clean the carpet got that on the wall and so normally this is rolled in front of it so that is where I'm storing that that door in sites there is just the middle pod area where there's storage space this little sign is actually from my kitchen I didn't know where else to put it so I just hung it there and just thought it was cute here is my classroom library so in the elementary setting I had two shorter IKEA bookcases that I sold and then I replaced it with the taller bookcase I did scale down some of the books that I had and donated them or gave them away and these are what I'm left with I do need to replace that phone because I mean you see it doesn't match anything and it's out of place so I will probably get a cordless phone eventually I am still keeping my picture books so my picture books are still here displayed in the same way that they were at the elementary level so these are two bookcases from Target and these baskets here are from Walmart I will try my best to link anything I can find or something similar and if I forget you can always ask me and I'll try and find the link for you and respond to you through the comment section so I just like to separate these books by month I'm gonna say this and I know I'm going to get comments asking me for these I still don't know where these are um someone said I can put pictures on Instagram so I might try and do that eventually when my life has slowed down with the adjustment of going to middle school I would like to may make videos or even I've contemplated creating teachers pay teacher's products for some of the books that I like to share the most but I do separate them by month and then each month has like a list of fun facts and there's a lot of books and these bins are related to one of the fun facts a national holiday or international holiday I decided to leave my picture books in the classroom even though I teach middle school I don't necessarily know that I'll read them as much as I did in elementary but they will definitely be on display and just be available to the students to use next to that I forgot to show these these are my IKEA chairs that we all have that go with this kidney table now the nice thing about having this classroom tour video up a little bit late is that some of the things that I didn't have last weekend when I should have done this I now have and the kidney table was one of them I'm so used to having a small group table just included in the classrooms that I've moved into because their standard furniture in the elementary schools in the district that I'm at but not necessarily standard at the middle school so luckily for me there was a middle school teacher here that had this that was ready to let it go I scooped it up as soon as I found out she was letting it go and so those stools just stay over there unless I caused some students back here and then they grabbed the stool and they sit with me this chair is like a old school looking chair that I got from Target years ago I don't know that they still sell it I did have to put my refrigerator and microwave in the classroom because the way the pot is set up at this school did not allow for me to have that in the pod and there was no space it's not the best look aesthetically but the positives are that my refrigerator is right by my desk and the refrigerator covers up the cord mess that is over there so there's that I tried to decorate it by just putting a little sign and a plan up there but I don't think it looks too bad this area by far is my favorite so this is my desk area what I saw this classroom when the school year ended last year and I asked the principal if I can just come in and take a look at the space I noticed there was no desk which was the perfect excuse for me to buy a desk so I bought this desk at Target I love that it has these little shelves here so I can put decorative items in there these were all things for my last classroom if you follow me on Instagram you know that I was a little panicked because I thought the desk would be a little bit longer going this way and it doesn't have any drawers drawers excuse me so if you look there there's no drawers there no drawers over there so I decided just to see what life would be like without drawers and so far one week into the school year it's worked out so I'm going to show you the things that I have done to make up for the fact that I don't have drawers so for example I have just a little tray of paper clips there and some hand sanitizer and chapstick some essentials post-it notes up here I have the stamp that I use for homework I would have kept that in the drawer that's normally kept in the drawer that's just the remote for my projector hinge I scaled down all my pins and just took every pin that I thought I would use into that container these are all the markers that I use if I wanted to make an anchor chart bigger binder or smaller I should say binder clips are kept in there my hand lotion just sits there and so when I thought about it these were the only things I truly needed that I had kept in a drawer and so I think it forces me to kind of just keep myself neat keep things clean and so far it's working so this is my desk area here that white chair is from Ikea then if you come around here this rug is on the floor I bought this from Target for about 20 something dollars it's hiding a big rip in the carpet on the floor and it's nice because it just gives it a little fill of being like at home then I have my diplomas hung I highly suggest hanging your diploma so people including your students know that you went to college and you're educated if that's something that they aspire to be it's good to set the example this little gold folder our gold wall piece here is from Target that is where I keep any notes that I get from students and it's kind of nice because when students give you a note and this was really me in my elementary life I don't know that I'll be getting love notes or I don't want to say love notes that sounds inappropriate I don't know that I'll be getting those sweet little notes from eighth graders but if I do I like the fact that I can put them in there and if a student ever asked where's the note that I gave you point to it and it's right in there and if I'm having a bad day I can just pull those notes out and say at some point I did something right for someone this item here is an addition that I bought this summer so this is just things that I need reference to very quickly right on top of my desk this was a little pricey in my opinion for what it is I was just surprised that it cost that much but I'm glad that I got it so anything that I need access cheats quickly like phone lists flow charts at the school this is the notes that I took from my study sink training which is the new program that I'm using so I want that at the ready that's all house there my document camera is there so again for those of you that are like oh my god you need a drawer so far I really like the fact that I don't have a drawer because it does not allow me to just start throwing things in a drawer and creating a mess now mind you I've only been in school for a week and you know sometimes you just start throwing things and drawers when you're under complete and utter stress and that could happen but so far so good this area here is let's go up here these are just files like from meeting notes and things like that they go up there these are magazine file holders that I got from Ikea a few years ago so I keep the teas and I'm not using there so these are for language arts anything reading related this is social studies this is like confidential stuff or stuff for my happy planner and then these are all my Canadian resources that I use the most as well as standards this is another one of those bookcases this is the exact same bookcase that you saw with my picture books and then I have these two bins here and this bin because a lot of people said you need a drawer to put your person this is where I put my purse and this bin it's pretty empty so whatever I need to put in there I can this bin has a little shelving unit from Ikea and my Chromebook and that then down there has the resources that I will need for my universal access class as well as my step up to writing binder which I will use on occasion but it's kind of big and I just kind of needed it to be tucked away so that's how I solve the problem of where to put my purse over here this is another one of my favorite spots these are the framed pictures from the magazine articles that I was fortunate enough to be a part of blast I think these were both last school year yeah I think they were both last school year and I love the way they turned out and I just like the way this wall came out my dad helped me hang this and when I collaborated on where things we're gonna go and I highly suggest if you're a teacher that you have some kind of mirror near your desk so that you can check your teeth check your makeup I also want to give a shout out to this sign right here this sign was given to me by the whimsical teacher Jess on Instagram she just made this for me and I loved it Mylo trees container doesn't have it yet but it will have a supply of chocolate in there these are picture books that I don't necessarily have a specific month for but I want to know exactly where they're at at all times excuse me most of them are growth mindset books namaste because I need to stake home and then these two bookends are from Target this little sign here I don't remember where I got this from but I love it it says today's good mood is brought to you by coffee because I have to have coffee in the morning during the school year as just like a comfort item then that plant there some IKEA this is an award that I got from a teaching conference and then this little cubby here is just decorative that little replica of the Taj Mahal is from a student teacher that I had last year and I do want the students to see just different pieces from travels so that's why that's there and then in this drawer here this is another solution to not have any drawers is where I had extra binder clips my CDs my Polaroid camera film and extra paper clips these shelves here have books that I kind of use but I don't necessarily use them on a regular basis that's a little souvenir from Estonia another drawer solution these bins here have post-it notes rubber bands the charger for my Chromebook and then these just have extra school supplies but they're in a pouch another solution to the desk is my stapler and tape was in there because I don't necessarily use that every day my thank-you cards that I need access to you if I get something from students is there that little book back there just for decoration my hole punch for my teacher or my happy planner is there and then in this little drawer a lint roller because I have dogs and I don't want to have dog hair all over me while I'm in class so let me pan back this is my teacher area again again one of my favorite areas because it feels like a home office and that's really what I wanted it to feel like and I really wanted my classroom to feel like a living room so hopefully that is coming across in the video this is the front of the room so these are the all or welcome sign or all are welcome in this classroom sign so this is a product that I bought off of Teachers Pay Teachers I showed it on Instagram it is the same phrase and 50 different languages if you see any of these and you know they are upside down please let me know because some of them fell so that it's quite possible but as you can see I'm still displaying my picture books on the board the difference is at the middle school level these are all fictional books those are all informational books down there I did buy a magnetic I think this is a magnetic curtain rod to hang anchor charts on to eventually over here is the chair that I had in my last class room and this runner rug that I got from Walmart that is being held in place by a gift of industrial-strength velcro strips that I got from Colby sharp who's also a teacher on YouTube and then when you come this way we have this table here this is the table where I store the tea's that I'm using at the time any copies that I'm going to be using for that particular week my Kagan timer is here a bin of just markers that I use for the board plant for decoration over here is where I have my your clipboards student jobs are posted there there's a couple jobs that are up here twice and I do know that like the calendar is up there twice and there might be something else that's up there twice ok now we're at the countertop and this is an area that a lot of people saw because I posted this on Instagram if you saw the vlog where I got into the classroom the first time if you remember there were some very ugly dark green countertops here I stole this idea from Fernanda at that one happy classroom this is just contact paper the contact paper I want to say costs maybe $20 on Amazon and you need it a little scraper to scrape it down this process was done thanks to the help of another friend who was a former room mom named Monica her and I did this together we had both never done it before and it took us in total about three hours not super hard but we just didn't have a strategy in place beforehand so I love the way the countertops turned out I can't tell you how many compliments I've gotten from staff members parents that have seen it some people actually thought that I had replaced the counters with marble because from afar they really do look like maybe they've been replaced so great idea how they suggest it if you can I am using mailboxes in middle school so this is color coded this is my homeroom class and this is my switch class so they have their mailboxes here it's labeled because I have this frame up here every week I will choose a VIP but I also decided I wanted to use this frame to let everybody know these are homeroom assignments or homeroom great at work and then that's switch great it works so I'll put the picture of the student that I chose as VIP up there this is the basket that I will use for the papers that need to be filed on their mailboxes I just still need to number these mailboxes but that will come with time this is a supply bin that I've had for years now so I just usually put paper in these baskets up here or just random school supplies pins dry erase markers excuse me highlighters Bret pens pencils erasers scissors erasers are all in there and then up here are some decorative items I am using the whole kerplunk thing for classroom management just very briefly if the kids do something well they get to take out a stick once all the marbles fall they get some sort of classroom get-together so I'm calling it I don't want to call it a party and then they put the sticks in here and that's actually a beverage container from Target that I'm using to hold the sticks so this is the kerplunk for my homeroom class that's the Kirkland for my switch class these are the mailboxes for my switch class they have a sign up there that lets them know it's the switch class this area is not quite done because there's a sign that says today today did you that sign again was made by the same parent that made the three signs by the door and my goal is have four framed sayings that go with this so there would be there would be two on this side and two on that side and it's just talking about different ways that they can ask for help or provide help to their classmates I just have to find someone that can do good hand lettering or order some nice prints with that saying or what those things from Etsy here I do still have a student inbox so this is stuff that they need to turn into me paper that they have completed and then I send to the office box if they have something that needs to go straight up to the office they put it here these will be my absent work folders and there those need to be labeled here I just added some pom-poms to the two corners just to give it decoration so there's some over there and I couldn't border in that area so that was really the original reason why I chose to put pom-poms there so I'm gonna do one more pan around the room so that you can kind of get a feel of what it feels like and then just to show you a couple of just organizational things in case you want to see that so I am so numbering the desk just for the purposes of things like table captains cooperative groups because it worked really well for me in elementary and that's the thing there are some things that I am just deciding to keep even though I'm teaching elementary or middle school now I'm keeping some of the things that I did in elementary because they were just good in terms of management and organization for me so numbering seats and having student numbers is one of those things and having weekly mailboxes is one of those things now hopefully they continue to work well for me I don't see why they wouldn't but that's what I decided so yeah that's the thing there were some things that I thought I wasn't going to do at the middle school level in terms of how I do some classrooms classroom management type things but then I just decided why wouldn't you continue to do it if it's something that was working for you at the elementary level or you felt successful with at the elementary school level so so that is my classroom at the middle school level all in all I'm very know not all in all I am happy with the way that the classroom turned out what my mind saw is what came to pass and I always panicked when I do these classrooms that what my mind is thinking is going to happen is somehow not going to happen but it all worked out and it probably came out a little bit better than what I even expected in some ways I'm mostly happy about the fact that I was able to keep the same like color scheme but still make it feel a little bit different and have a positive response from the middle schoolers they liked the gold they liked the fact that it has some modern touches to it they liked the countertops one of the kids that go to the school happened to walk through my classroom one morning I think was the first day of school and he was just walking through with another teacher and he was like wow or all the countertops in the other classrooms like this and me and the teacher were like no so that makes me feel good that they like it just as much as I do so let me give you one last look there it is I'm so glad to be done quite honestly but it's worth it in the end to see students reaction as well as parents reaction and and to be in a place that I feel comfortable with so again I know this is not for everyone some people don't agree with this elaborate level of setting up a classroom or seem that much in just like the decorations or the aesthetic of the classroom but for me it makes me feel comfortable it makes me feel happier to be here it makes the kids feel good and that's all that matters at the end of the day so if you like the tour if you enjoyed it give it a thumbs up again any questions that you have about anything that I said or something that you saw that I didn't reference or mentioned please let me know and I will do the best that I can to answer that for you aside from that I hope that you guys have seen the previous set of videos before this so that you can kind of see the process along the way and I hope that you guys tune in for any of the middle school vlogs that I upload and just kind of follow that journey as well because I'm super excited for this new chapter in my professional life and I truly do feel like I'm in the right place at the right time which wasn't a feeling that I was necessarily having these past couple of years so again thanks for watching and I hope to see you guys in my upcoming books all right you

Channel: SmartieStyle

Views: 35,162

Rating: 4.9583621 out of 5

Keywords: classroom tour, classroom set up, teacher vlog, teaching vlog, a day in the life of a teacher

Id: AlBfp48dR8w

Length: 29min 50sec (1790 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 11 2019