Everybody's Workin' For the Weekend! Update!!

Last year I posted about making a couple documents relating to classroom jobs.  I am including them here for you to peruse.  Again, I definitely borrowed from many sources, but I tailored them to fit for my classroom needs.

I used these jobs this year

Classroom Contributions by Anne Friederich

And here is the document I used for the job application.

Classroom Job Application by Anne Friederich

I definitely will be making some changes to the positions. I may get rid of a couple and/or maybe repurpose a few. In the previous year, we had study hall in our rooms at least every other day. However, this school year the students had study hall in other locations. It was easy in the past for students to work on some helpful tasks because they were in our rooms or even in the same building. With study hall being in other locations during our regular teaching time made it difficult for students who wanted to help out with certain tasks. That's something I need to rethink. Either, I will only accept those who really are committed to some extra time occasionally or I will have to have some items I want them to help with mostly ready to go. Of course, we don't know what our schedule will be like at all next year, so there is still the element of unknown out there.

I would like to spend a bit more time training students on how to do some of the jobs and I would like for the expert students to do some of the training for the ones who are taking over that position for the new quarter.  For the office parties, I usually held three separate ones during social time after students were done eating lunch. I might see if there is interest in having something in the mornings during this upcoming school year.

I have some more pondering to do before I redraft my positions, but I did enjoy using jobs this past year. I think the students really enjoyed them as well. Unfortunately, some of my students that I really hoped would have a job didn't sign up for various reasons. Have you used classroom jobs with your middle school students? What things really worked for your classroom, and what struggles did you have?

Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend!

I have such a backlog of posts that I have been stewing about or I have written, but just haven't re-edited.  I really want to use this blog to be a more reflective practitioner, but it is really hard sometimes to keep up with things.  Even in the summer!!!

Last year, I sent out a message to the NSTA listservs about classroom contributions.  I have wanted to help promote responsibility, caring, efficiency, and a host of other qualities in my classroom.  I didn't quite get things as organized as I would have liked to last year, so yesterday as I was working on beginning of the year items, I revisited the message.  I also looked at many other examples online.  It really was awesome to see all the resources out there to help me as I developed my classroom contributions.   I came up with a document that talked about having jobs in the classroom this year and I created a table that listed the titles, descriptions, and how many positions are available.  I also created a job application for the students to complete with their top four job choices.  There were some pretty creative job titles that I either used or modified.  I am particularly excited about the class ninja.  I saw that one on somebody's example, and I thought that it would be a better title than substitute!

  I am really excited to see how this works in the classroom this year.  I have high hopes that it will be successful!  :)