The end of August is approaching and teachers all across the country are getting ready for the start of a new school year. We’ve written all about how to prepare a new classroom if you’ve started in a new school or if you’ve moved rooms, but that’s often not the case. Many teachers will be staying in their classroom for another year, and though this means you don’t have to worry about moving everything and starting your classroom from scratch, it’s still nice to give it a bit of a refresh. So here’s some of our best tips and advice for preparing your classroom for a new school year.
Inventory your resources
This is a great time of year to take a good look at what you have and what you need. During the school year, things can get misplaced and end up in random parts of your classroom, so take a bit of time to go through all the drawers and shelves (especially the ones accessible to your students) and take out anything that doesn’t belong there. As you’re looking through all your storage, you’ll get a good idea of what you already have lots of, and what you’re running low on. Then you can make a note somewhere of what you need to stock up on for the new school year.
Refresh your decorations
At TPTC, we love our printables and we release beautiful new designs for our display packs every year. But we also want to encourage you to reuse things year after year – it’s better for the environment, and saves you time! That’s why we recommend printing things from your display pack, like posters, bunting, borders, and labels, onto satin card. It’s more durable and gives a really nice finish, so hopefully it’ll last you a while! However, things do get used and after a school year some things can look really worn, especially things in high traffic areas, like labels on drawers that students open and close every day. Have a look around and print out new copies of things that are looking a little worse for wear. Tip: When you’re editing your display packs to suit your classroom, like adding your drawer labels, make sure you save the edited version so it’s super quick and simple to print off new ones when you need to replace them.
Get planning
There’s so much to do for a new school year! Even if you’re staying in your classroom and in your own year group, there are always changes to incorporate. Maybe your school are using a new scheme of learning, maybe the national curriculum has changed slightly, or you’re adding a new topic. So even if you’re sticking with your year group, there’s still lots to get planning! Of course, we suggest getting one of our Teacher Planners. They’re designed by teachers, for teachers to really help you sort your lesson planning and schedule your weeks. We suggest filling out our long term plan to help get you ready for the new school year, then you can use it to help with your medium and short term planning later and you’ll have a head start.
Assess needs
If you’re staying in the same classroom, it saves you a lot of time and work it would take to move to a new room. But there’s still a big change happening – a new group of students! Maybe you’ve had a meeting with your new class’s current teacher, or maybe you have reports you can take a look at. However you can, take a look at your new group of students and assess their needs. What can you incorporate into your classroom to help with this? We recently did a classroom makeover for our competition winner, and we adapted our bunting to incorporate BSL for each letter to help support her students. Maybe you can use more imagery in your labels, or have some things labelled in an additional language. Could you add a zones of regulation poster, or a calm down area? Think carefully about what you could add to your classroom to meet the specific needs of your new students.
What went well?
It’s great to think about what you can change to do better, and ways to improve your classroom. But it’s also important to look back on the year and think about what went well. You can learn from it and incorporate elements into other areas of your classroom. Maybe you work in EYFS and you had some really clear posters with pictures showing children how to use the sink area and keep it tidy and dry. If this helped your students to use this area properly and be more independent, maybe you can incorporate the idea elsewhere, and put up similar posters in the cloakroom area to show how to come into school and get ready to enter the classroom. It’s also nice just to be able to give yourself a pat on the back sometimes – teaching is all about reflecting and learning and growing, but with all the hard work you put in, sometimes it’s good to take a moment and just give yourself a big well done. (Our Proud Place page in our Teacher Planner is great for this!)
