If you don’t explicitly train your students to clean up after themselves, they’ll happily allow you to do it for them. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to develop a system for tidying and cleaning our classroom. I can’t tell you how many hours I spent picking up after the kids. But with age comes wisdom and I learned to study other teachers who had this skill more in hand. I found that once I had routines in place, things went much more smoothly. For instance, our

Now that we've taken care of our small supplies and our unit equipment what else do we have to think about? Is there anything we could put on display? Are there things we could put out to make a room more engaging and look like a science classroom? What about microscopes, glassware, or engaging equipment like a skeleton or a Van de Graaff machine? These are the items I like to have out in the open if possible—I want folks to come in and to know exactly what goes on in our cl

When setting up your classroom space and routines, I think it’s helpful to think of this process as crafting a schema—a buzzword we used...

Last week we discussed storing small items such as office supplies and smallish pieces of equipment used on a regular basis. Today we’ll...

Do you wish you had more classroom sinks? Do you wish you had any classroom sinks? That was certainly my issue when I walked into our...

I grew up on an island… We had two grocery stores and little else in the way of shopping. Needless to say we became pretty adept and...

I teach in a small room. It’s full of dangerous equipment. My students are 11-14 year olds. What could go wrong? After a long stint in the Museum Ed field, I returned to the classroom and the challenges of Middle School science. One of my early commitments was a daily lab. I’d seen the value of hands-on education in the museum and wanted to bring that to the classroom. While that might seem monumental, I was undaunted. The economy of scale would pay off, I reasoned. W