room transformation
The Floor is Lava Room Transformation
I needed/wanted to come up with an end of the year review of all our math. I had these lava tablecloths left over from our volcano themed literacy night, so I figured having a floor is lava day would be the best way to cover the content!
1st: I set up the classroom where they had to travel to 12 different stations. Each station was a math unit we did this year. They were in groups of 3, and each student in each group had to complete 1 question per station. (I tried to vary difficulty so kids could have a challenge or something that wouldn’t be too hard for them depending on skill level.)
Once they’d completed all 12 stations, they had to give me their papers to be marked. Errors had to be fixed etc. Then I put a star beside 3 numbers hidden within the papers. These were the three digits to a code for a lock on a suitcase hiding under “a volcano.” (Tables stacked)
They had to come up with the 6 possible combinations of those three numbers before I would let them try the lock. When they were ready, I let them under the table to try and get the treasure. (Treasure was 2 chocolate gold coins each.) They had to put the lock back on for the next group, and hide the treasure in their pockets or hands so that the others who weren’t done yet couldn’t see what the secret treasure was. I sent them to another part of the school to eat their chocolate before returning to our class.
I can identify 3 positives and 3 negatives from the day.
Positives:
1) The kids had fun and did WAY more thinking and math work for me than they ever would have on a regular June day. 2) It only cost $25 from the Dollar store. (Red/black tablecloths, red balloons and chocolate coins) The leftover lava tablecloths were from a literacy night, so technically didn’t cost me anything. 3) The students worked really well together, and because they had to work as a team to get their own treasure, it wasn’t competitive between the other groups.
Negatives:
1) There were definitely some injuries. Anytime you have 8 yr olds climbing on furniture, apparently some of them are going to get hurt. 2) This discouraged some of them, and after lunch, some of them chose to do just the math part without the climbing around the classroom. (Still a win in my books) 3) It did take me a lot of prep. Mostly to create the 12 unit reviews. However, now that I have those, I can use them any year with any theme I choose. Also, it took me about 2.5 hours after school to set up the classroom. And in June, this feels like 89 hours. But, all in all, worth it in my books. I was tired, but the kids and I had a great day!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Train Room Transformation
Many of my students needed some serious help with letters and sounds last year. I blame Covid and moving to online learning. I decided to devote a day to imprinting the letters and sounds on their brain. I got them all hyped up knowing something fun was coming by sending home a ticket the night before, and telling them they had to bring it back the next day. If there’s one thing I learned, it’s that the build up the day before can be the best part of a room transformation!
When the students got there, I had turned the room into a train… the best I could. I had printing an uppercase letter on each of their tickets, and when they got there, their seat was the lowercase letter that matched.
The kids had a blast, and I had fun setting it up for them. I know they can’t all solidify their letters and numbers in one day, but I REALLY do believe it helped!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Antarctica Room Transformation
This post is years in the making! Unfortunately, I don’t blog much anymore, and I just realized I have some pictures on my phone of this room transformation, and I never did post about it! So here we go! My job share partner, our intern and I set up a room transformation in December to help get those kids to Christmas break without losing all interest!
We had to GET to Antarctica so we drove a ship there. 
My job share partner is the best. Did she dress up as a penguin that day? She sure did! 
This was a super easy theme to run with. There are a ton of ideas to turn any type of learning into Winter/Antarctica learning. We found that it kept the students interested and engaged during a time where they might otherwise be off the walls!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Construction Room Transformation
Last June, I did a construction themed room transformation, and I am just getting the time to blog about it now! It was a great success! I encourage other teachers to try it!
The idea came from the outcome- CC2.4-
Write stories, poems, friendly letters, reports, and observations using appropriate and relevant details in clear and complete sentences and paragraphs of at least six sentences.
The indicator was “Polish at least eight pieces through the year.” So the I can statement was- “I can polish at least 8 pieces this year.”
In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have left ALL the students’ editing to the end of the year, but I did… So I decided to turn it into a 2 day construction site, where we were going to be doing a lot of CONSTRUCTION on our writing.
This was the feel for the classroom environment; I had bought caution tape from the dollar store, I borrowed orange pylons from our gym, the two big pylons from our caretaker, and the orange scaffolding was what held our Phys Ed mats. I had borrowed construction books from my local library, found some free printables from Pinterest and that was all I had! This classroom transformation cost me a total of $4 for the construction tape. The best part was the concerned students from other classrooms asking what happened to our classroom and if everyone was ok!
We started off the first day by reading/looking through the library books to get a feel for what construction is, and all the different tools a construction worker might use.
I decided to have the kids start editing their oldest writing projects first. The ones from the beginning of the year needed the most work, and at the beginning of the first day, the students had the most stamina and excitement. By the end of the second day, we were finishing up the most recent writing project. This writing was considerably better than what they wrote in September, (duh) so there weren’t as many edits.
I used little construction writing cards to help them edit. 
We talked about all of the different things that needed editing: Sentence structure/content, uppercase/lowercase letters, punctuation, spelling, 
letter sizing and spacing. They had to look at their writing, identify what needed work, and then choose the correct “tool” for the job. These cards were literally pictures of tools. The kids loved the choice of what to edit. When they were editing written work, I had them staple the tool into their book so I could see which page/writing piece they had edited. 
When they were editing their Book Creator books on the iPads, they took a picture of the tools they used, and the book they were working on.
I was shocked at how much they got done in those two days. By the second day, the students were wearing their own construction gear to school,
and they really bought into the whole idea! Who knew editing writing could be so much fun?
I had borrowed my friend’s ‘real life construction vest,’ and once the students had edited their work, we had a sharing time, where they were allowed to come up to the front, wear the construction vest and share with the class what they had fixed.
Again, who knew so many kids wanted to share their editing process! But as soon as they got to wear the vest, they were ALL OVER IT.
At the end of the second day, we worked on another construction project. Father’s Day was coming up that weekend, and so we made our dads little string hearts. 
The students had to pound the nails in themselves, and they loved using real hammers. (I had borrowed the kids hammers from my dad who runs a kids club at his church where they make wood cars as a project.)
They drew on the heart, wrote dad at the top, and then pounded in nails in the shape of the heart. I’m not exactly sure what the dads will do with these creations, but the students loved making them and using real hammers to pound in the nails!
Upon reflection, the biggest thing I would change about this experience would be not leaving all the editing until this day. Even though they did awesome, it wasn’t as comprehensive as I would have liked!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The Doll People Room Transformation
“Room transformations” have been going on for a long time, but Hope and Wade King, authors of the Wild Card, have popularized it in recent years through their book and workshops. This is how I turned my classroom into a dollhouse for two full days of themed adventures in grade 2.
First, our class read the novel, The Doll People for the last two months. I would read aloud one chapter during our classroom “Quiet Time” three times a week. The students, both boys and girls, were really into it. It’s very Toy Storyesque but with a female protagonist. 🙂
Once we had finished the novel on the Friday, I surprised them by letting them watch Toy Story on the afternoon of the Monday. We used Mentimeter as a backchannel during the movie, and they compared similarities and differences between the two stories. We are 1:1 in my grade 2 class, so everyone had an iPad that they could type their answers into. We would pause every 30 minutes or so to look at some of the answers that had come in to give others ideas if they hadn’t written anything yet. The answers weren’t always super clear, but after the movie was over, we went through each answer and the child was allowed to explain what they meant.
A screenshot of some of the answers I was getting throughout the movie.
On the Tuesday, I gave the students a “clue” to what was going to be happening on Wednesday. I photocopied the page out of the novel that looked like Auntie Sarah’s journal entry with spiders drawn all around the outside of the page. I handed it to them right at the end of the day and told them it was their “clue.”
The next morning when the students showed up, I didn’t even let them in the classroom. I was dressed as Tiffany Funcraft, and I took them right upstairs to the art room to paint their doll people. My principal had let me buy some wooden dolls off of Amazon. We used water soluble acrylic paint and little paint brushes. There were 40 dolls in the package, and I only have 22 students in my class, so most students got 2 dolls each.
When they finished, we came downstairs. I had turned my classroom into Kate’s (the human character in the book) dollhouse. I made the classroom door into the front door of the dollhouse, and set up five rooms; the parlour, the bedroom, the kitchen, the library, and the attic. In our school we have accordion dividers in each pod. I borrowed three and moved them into my classroom, partitioning off each section into a dollhouse room. The breakout room connected to our classroom became the attic.
I knew the kids were going to be excited, so I gave them time to just play around and pretend. They went through each room and were just giggling with joy. They loved it.
While the students were playing, I had my friend Jann, a retired colleague of mine, pull students in groups of 4. I had brought some dress up clothes for the kids to dress up in, and she was taking pictures of them in front of a green screen.
Then the students used the app, GreenScreen by DoInk to insert themselves into some dollhouse pictures. Jann said she didn’t do any of it for them. She just gave verbal instructions, and they did it all. That’s the nice thing about the app. It is very child friendly!
The results were awesome, and I actually printed these pictures out and glued them onto black construction paper and gave them as gifts at the end of Thursday as a little reminder of their time as dolls over the two days.
Before lunch, we went back to the upstairs art room and worked on acrostic poems with our new wooden doll’s names. I used an example with Annabelle, the protagonist. The rest of the students came up with their own doll names and wrote about what their doll was like through the acrostic poem. Some were very creative!
On Wednesday afternoon, Auntie Sarah went missing, and the students had to complete a variety of tasks to find her. There was a code they needed that they could only get by doing double digit addition, they had to get past “The Captain” (the cat from the story) by creating a cat on the Osmo tangram app, they had to find the rhyming words from the story in a bunch of other words that didn’t rhyme using iCard Sort, and they had to go on a QR scavenger hunt (we use the QR reader app Inigma to eventually find clues that would lead to Auntie Sarah. The kids had a blast completing all the activities. It was sort of like an escape room, but not…
On Thursday, I showed up as Uncle Doll. 🙂
We spent the entire day preparing our own doll stories and then recording them. To storyboard, we used the app, Paper. This app is amazing because it still works on the iPad 1s. Each child was responsible to create 5 “pages” for their groups’ story. 1) Beginning: Introduce characters/setting. 2) Beginning 2: Character traits and goals 3) Middle: The problem 4) The problem continued 5) The resolution.
The students could draw and/or write in this app which made it perfect for differentiation as some kids found it way easier to type… as they don’t love art. Others hate writing and so they were able to draw their scenes out. Because every member in each group was writing out their story in a different way, they could use everyone’s storyboard to piece together what was going to happen in the group’s story.
This drawing was done on an iPad1 where there is only one drawing option available. It is the calligraphy pen highlighted on the left hand side of her iPad.
When they were done collaborating and co-creating their doll people stories, they got to take a doll house. (I had borrowed 7 from friends and colleagues for the day.) They went to a quiet corner of the school and recorded their doll people stories in the doll houses.
The trickiest thing for them to learn was to keep the iPad close enough to the doll house so that they didn’t get each other in the shot. They had a blast using their own wooden dolls that they had created to act out the stories. Some of them used Seesaw to record and post their videos.
Others used the iPad’s camera roll, and then iMovie to splice the clips/scenes together.
By the end of the day, everyone was so excited to share their stories with the rest of the class. Since this was the last day before Easter break, I took the last half hour to get the students to help me take down our dollhouse classroom. The students were heart broken that we were taking it down, and they kept asking if we could set it up like that again sometime.
I might do another classroom transformation before the end of the school year… I will see. Upon reflection, I think I would find a way to keep the tables together and not partition the classroom so much though. I found it difficult to manage all the children in different rooms at one time. I needed to have some type of perch where I could see all students at once. Something to think about for next time.
Any comments or suggestions? Please comment below!
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