Magic Carpet

You wouldn't believe what we've discovered! After many experiments, extreme observations, and days of testing, Ms. B and I have discovered something outstanding about our classroom. We are in possession of a Magic Carpet! A circle carpet, that can barely seat 22 students, holds the power to focus and give motivation for learning to each of our students.

Our class has a hard time learning from their desks. It's hard to focus, some have trouble directing their attention so far away, the volume in the class quickly gets louder and louder. Ms. B and I decided to teach our mini-lessons in smaller groups (parallel teaching if you remember my post from teacher orientation!). We are both teaching the same thing to smaller groups of students, and it provides us with more opportunities to focus on the structure of the mini-lesson and engage and involve the students. Plus, it provides us a chance to show them the structure we are developing for them to learn in (& calms the chaos). Our thinking was to work this way for a while until we could start bringing them back together and learn/teach as a whole group.

This process of breaking the class up works great... for half the class: the half that's meeting on our magic carpet. The other (less fortunate) half meets at the front of the room, originally sitting on cold, hard, un-carpeted floors and now pulling up chairs in a semi-circle. No matter the group or the teacher, they are just not as successful as the group benefiting from the magic of the carpet in the back corner.

We've requested a second carpet, and if we don't get one (probably won't), you can guarantee I'll sacrifice some of my Teacher's Choice money so we can have a second carpet area for small group mini-lessons. We'll just need to put our problem solving caps on (wear mine daily) to figure out exactly how to create that second carpet area within our already packed classroom (the one with the extra furniture that we are required to keep, even though we have no use for it or desire to keep it wasting the little space we do have).