Episode 18: Podcast Recap

There are a lot of different ways to set up and organize your room for the year. When you start to search online for new ideas, it might be overwhelming! In this episode, we share some of the ways we organize and set up our own art rooms. 

Our rooms are in the same district and in schools that were designed the same. So a lot of the things we talk about are similar to each other. We both have large tables for kids to sit at with rolling carts to store everyday supplies students might need. We also both have a large counter that is like an island that has storage within it including large flat drawers that we use to store artwork.

Laura color coordinates a lot of things throughout her art room. Each table is a color, each table has a colored folder to match that students keep ongoing artwork in, and then those folders go into a larger folder for each class. Days of the week are color coordinated in drawers and also in a teacher binder holding seating charts and rosters. 

Both Hayley and Laura store student artwork in those large drawers under the counter. One tip that both enjoy, is organizing it by DAY and not by grade level. We are lucky that we have each grade each day, so if all grades are doing something different and then put into the same drawer, it’s easy to keep them from getting mixed up. If you keep every class of a grade level in the same drawer, classes could get mixed up and all look similar to it’s harder to sort out!

Having a designated place to turn in artwork is important and if it is kept consistent throughout the year and over the course of many years, students should know where it is. Displaying some sort of visual of what we are doing that day and for each project is important for your students. We talk in this episode about how we set ours up differently (Laura has an “I Can” wall and Hayley has an “Inspiration Wall”) and if you don’t have that much wall or whiteboard space, there’s a helpful tip thrown in there! 

Jobs have been an ever changing thing in both rooms. We talk about different ways we have done them and why we don’t do them anymore!

While this is just a small recap of what we talked about and how we organize our rooms, you’ll have to tune in and listen to the whole episode to hear all our helpful tips and ideas!

Keep blending,

Hayley and Laura