So the students walked in on Monday morning and oohed and ahhed over everything. I had talked to them about it the Friday before, but as little kids have a hard time remembering the recent past, they were still really surprised. Some of the comments I heard were "It's so cool!" "It feels so relaxing in here" "There's so much space!" and lots of other positive stuff. I was thrilled! I let them explore for a few minutes and then I called a class meeting. We talked about expectations and I ran through all the different options that they had to do work. Moving around the classroom is not a problem for my kids, as I do a lot of center work and they know what to do and how to act during these times.
When we moved to work spaces, it went much more smoothly that I imagined it would. They quickly chose a spot and there was no arguing. I had made it clear that everyone would get to try everything over the next couple of days. Through the day I kept track of where people were and tried to make sure that they moved through all the options. For the most part, it worked. After the initial trial I didn't worry about it, as they moved themselves around easily and I only had to intervene with a couple of kiddos.
Here's what it looked like in action:
In my next post, I'll talk about what I learned from the whole experience.
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