I'm starting my 12th year teaching in my current elementary music classroom this week. Hard to believe I've been working in this space for this long! I love my classroom and have been slowly tweaking things every year that I've been in the room. This year is no different- here's my classroom for the 2024-2025 school year!
Let's start off with a quick spin around the room to get our bearings. Those of you who have seen my classroom in previous years, let's play a little game: can you spot the changes?
What's new: I made 2 main changes to my classroom this year: my front wall (where my board is) and a couple of shelves in my wall of open shelving.
I have quite a few posters hanging around my front board, where I do the majority of my teaching from for 1st-6th grade: hand signals for common requests (bathroom, tissue, and this year I added water), my "respect" expectations, learning intention boards, and music concept anchor charts. All of them are visuals for things that I consider central to success in my classroom, and they are all things my students reference often. Besides adding a poster for the water signal I didn't add or remove anything, really, but over the years I have been adding to various parts of that wall and it was looking a little chaotic. I resized the posters (*cough* there's another good reason to get printable posters like mine here so you can make them whatever size you need) and lined them all up so they fit more neatly in the space and hopefully, are easier for students to look at when they need to without being too distracting. I think it made a big difference!
I also finally addressed a shelf that has been an issue for a long time on my wall of open shelving: the top right shelf gets absolutely COVERED in dust because of the air intake vent that's inside it. I don't know why I thought putting fabric puppets there was a good idea, because they were impossible to clean when they got all dusty! So I got some clear bins with lids for my scarves, stretchy band, and other movement props and put those on the dusty shelf, and moved my puppets to where the movement props were before on the top far left shelf instead. Not a big change in aesthetics, I know, but it is a big improvement in functionality!
I also added some mini keyboards and adjusted my storage on the open shelving for those mid-year last year, which made a big difference! I started storing them vertically so they weren't sitting on top of each other and smashing the keys under them (true story). They're the green and white things in the middle shelves.
What's the same: Other than that, most of my classroom setup is basically the same! If you're wondering about anything specific in my room please leave a comment or email me and I'll be happy to share more details about anything you see. Here are a few photos from around the room to give you a closer look!
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