New Year, New Classroom

Wow! Where did the summer go?? I feel like with my Grad School classes I barely had a break, now  I have two rooms to get ready, with students starting in 6 days! Yikes! Towards the end of last year I started transitioning my classroom to a choice-based room. I have decided to start my year off with a TAB classroom.

The first thing I decided to do for my classroom this year was to find an easier way to keep track of where a student goes in their choice center. I found a new store in Canton called Everything Education that is amazing! It has the best prices of any educator store I have seen in the area! If you're in Northeastern Ohio, I definitely recommend it! Anyway, while there I found chart paper for $8.99, it is just plain white chart paper, but having to buy two (one for each room) it was worth putting my own lines on. The lined paper was $34 a piece, which compared to other places is still a really good price, it just wasn't in my price range right now. After lining my paper with spots for 28 students on each piece, I wanted to find a way to have the students mark their station. Originally I was going to use bingo daubers, but they are really hard to find! I did finally find them at Dollar Tree just to find out that they bleed through the paper and take a really long time to dry. I opted for stamps instead. I found these rubber letter stamps at Joann Fabrics for $4.27 after my teacher discount and their 25% off all stamp supplies deal. I tested it out and they are perfect! I am going to have an available centers menu that is numbered with each center listed. Students will find their listed number and color associated with it, to mark the station they are headed to. So far this is as far as I have gotten with prep, but once I set it all up in my room, I will update you! 

How I Started Running My T.A.B. Classroom

This week in S.T.E.A.M. I started taking the plunge into a choice-based classroom which helps Teach for Artistic Behaviors (T.A.B.). It has been such a rewarding experience. The picture to the left was a response from two of my students who "loved the stations I made". I found this on my whiteboard after their third grade class left, after experiencing stations for the first time. I used Pixlr to edit the whiteboard writing to be more interesting. To see more about Pixlr read my blog from yesterday, Cool Tool #5: Pixlr.

My lesson for my third grade students was to think about where fractions are represented in the real world. We listed several different options we thought of. As the students were sitting in the "lecture horseshoe" I explained what their required assignment was going to be. They are required to use the media of their choice to create a fraction in the real world. When they design their fraction it cannot be a shape that is divided into pieces it needs to show an actual object. Some examples were a chocolate bar, pie, pizza, etc. Third graders came up with some even more creative ideas, one of the many reasons I love young minds! 

 After the lesson was explained I gave each student a Popsicle stick with their name and class code on it. I took this idea from Johanna Russell's T.A.B. classroom in the video I mentioned in my blog post, "Becoming The T.A.B. Classroom". After each student had their Popsicle stick I wrote out the eight stations that were available to them on post-it notes and stuck them on my "demonstration table" in the middle of the lecture horseshoe. The stations that I made available were: crayons, chalk, watercolor paint, digital media (Google Drawings), drawing pencils, markers, collage and oil pastels. Students would choose their station by placing their stick on top of a post-it note face down so no one could see their name. After all the students had chosen, I would rearrange sticks if there were more than five students in a group. if a student had to be moved from their first-choice station, I put a dot and the date on the back of their stick, so that the next time they chose, they would automatically get their first choice. One thing I learned, but forgot to say in my first class was to tell students that once they put their stick in a station, it must stay there. It got a little chaotic without that requirement.
I don't have any completed work yet, unfortunately. After explaining the process and lesson to my students, we only had about five minutes of work time left. I'm looking forward to the weeks to come, as what they have started looks pretty cool. When students left I had two cups for them to put their sticks into. The cups were "I'm finished" and "I need more time". All of my students put their sticks into the "I need more time" cup.

 I really like the choice-based/T.A.B. classroom, so far. I am looking forward to continuing my growth with this setup, I can definitely see it benefiting the concepts of S.T.E.A.M. I hope to start out with it next year and see how a whole year of choices will turn out. I want to keep you informed and I will do the best I can with keeping you up-to-date.

Any thoughts, questions, or ideas are always welcome!

Let's Talk About Learning Spaces

If you haven't realized it yet, I love to try new things in my instruction and have a very unorthodox classroom. With that being said, my learning space is also very different from the ordinary classroom. Many of my colleagues are surprised to see how my students are working when they walk into my room during the day. Sometimes my students are sitting at tables, but that is on a very rare occasion, as you know from my "Dare to Un-chair" blog, I typically do not have chairs in my room. Most of the time when you walk in my room my students are either standing around the table, sprawled out on the floor or sitting somewhere else around the room. I have witnessed some interesting things happen in my classroom with the multiple learning spaces I have created.

Increased Engagement and Learning:

Ever since I have changed my room to no chairs, I have watched my students' work increase. Since the students are standing while I give lectures, I find that the students who usually fidget with things they are not supposed to be touching, are just moving their bodies instead. They are usually looking at me and listening while they are doing this. I have also noticed that their work quality has increased and their creativity has also made a significant jump as compared to my previous classroom setup. I don't know if it is the increase of blood flow to their brain or just the ability to get comfortable that has made these changes occur.

With my new TAB setup, the children loved the change. It seems that every time I change my room, the students get excited about it and seem to be on task for a longer period of time. With all the stations spreading my students all over the room, behavior issues have gone down. Students are no longer crammed into one uncomfortable learning space, instead they can go to a place of their choice and one that is comfortable for them. When students choose what they want to do, they are more likely to stay engaged with the activity longer.

Google Apps for Education and Learning Spaces:

I love Google Apps for Education. I am constantly using them with my upper elementary students and sometimes with my younger elementary students. One of my favorites is Google Classroom. When I start lessons with apps, I have my students go to my Google Classroom first, to get their assignment. With students scattered all over my room, having assignments in Google Classroom is so much more effective, than my old style of teaching. My old style was to write the assignment on the white board and have students at their seat working. When students are under tables, sprawled out on the floor or sitting at a station that has their back to the board, teaching this way is no longer logical. When a student goes into Google Classroom, they are able to see the assignment from the comfort of their new seat. I also like that an absent student can easily access what they have missed.

I have started to incorporate a digital media station in my TAB Classroom setup. With this in mind I have been teaching more Google Apps and other creative education apps, to my students. I want my students to know how to use the apps correctly before I set them free to use them on their own.

Take the risk:

I think sometimes as teachers we get stuck doing what is comfortable or easy, instead of taking risks. I know that many of my colleagues are intimidated by the noise and what looks to be chaos in my room. From an "outside-looking-in" perspective, I'm sure it looks pretty crazy. What I know, though, is that every one of my students is working and doing so in a way that best suites their needs.

Have you already taken the risk or do you have suggestions on other learning spaces? Let me know!

The TAB Transformation: A Long Work in Progress.

Transforming my room into a TAB classroom has been a lot of work. I am very grateful that I have had a couple diligent 5th graders who come in twice a week to help me make posters for each center and organize materials. This past week I have been setting up for my STEAM Showcase, which is an art show for my third through fifth graders at both elementary schools. It is also a lot of work, so a lot of my TAB creation has been done by my fifth graders.

I did introduce some choice-based lessons to my kindergarten and first grade students, this week. The students loved the idea of being in charge of what materials they used to complete their assignment. The assignment I chose to experiment with was an extension to the book, "The Day The Crayons Quit" by Drew Daywalt. If you have never read that book it is a hilarious story told by crayons about their complaints of how their owner uses them. It is a great character building story and perfect for an art room.

My students are hard at work while choosing where to sit and which material to use.

Back to my lesson. After we read the book, I had the first students write letters to the crayons to convince them to come back and to draw a picture showing why they needed that color. I allowed my students to choose from the following art supplies: crayons, colored pencils and markers. For my kindergartners, I had them draw a picture of a crayon but they had to practice their 3-dimensional shape drawing skills. They also had to give the crayon a people-like expression and some clothes. I gave the kindergartners the same material choices. Overall I found the choice-based lesson to be beneficial. In my next post I am going to talk about flexible seating and the classroom environment. The way the choices worked, students got comfortable and were sprawled all over the room. It limited behavior issues and allowed students to perform in a comfortable environment.

I think with this small taste of TAB/choice-based curriculum, it is just leaving me hungry for more. I am looking forward to when I can jump into my new TAB curriculum, full-forced.

If you have any suggestions or would like to know the other ways I used "The Day the Crayons Quit" please contact me through Twitter or the comment section below!

TAB Classroom Progress

This week all of my free time has been spent on creating posters for my different centers, along with doing research. Here is a picture of the posters that are in progress with some help from my fifth graders. 

Some great resources I have found so far have been:

• Janine Campbell of www.janinecampbell.weebly.com
• Artechtivity: http://www.artechtivity.com/steam-choice-challenge/

I haven't gotten the opportunity to use some of these techniques yet. I am hoping to start on Monday. I will let you know how it goes. If you have any suggestions or ideas, I'd love to here them. Comment on here or tweet me @STEAMJames.

You can use the QR Scanner in your Twitter app to add me here:

Turning My STEAM Classroom into a TAB Classroom: An Online Journey

Hello and welcome to my TAB classroom journey. The next couple of weeks you will get to experience my classroom's transformation. I will try my best to share my experiences and ideas as I go along. I hope you enjoy and maybe even find some inspiration to try something new, too! If you do, I would love to hear about it! Please leave a comment below or contact me through one of my various social media sources.

Introduction:

In order for me to properly take you on the journey with me, you need to know how and why I have decided to go towards the TAB classroom idea. So let's start at the beginning. In my district we have the opportunity to turn two of our professional development days into "trade days". A trade day is just what it sounds like, we get to trade a typical professional development day into a day off if we complete a class with other teachers throughout a three month period. For my April trade day, I joined the art teachers in our district to go over the Art of Ed's Winter Conference. While choosing our conference sessions, I came across one called "Infusing STEAM concepts into a TAB Classroom" by Kelly Phillips. Since my education license and background is not actually in art, I had no idea what a TAB classroom was. It was originally the STEAM acronym that caught my eye. So I asked the seasoned art teachers what it meant. The high school teacher, Sara, explained to me that it stood for teaching artistic behaviors or choice-based-curriculum. This idea intrigued me so I decided to research it on my own. I found a lot of information from the website, TAB Teaching for Artistic Behavior. Here is what I discovered: