Save 10% today on your lessons using the code GIVEME10

Back to School: Classroom Management Tips and Resources

Back to school classroom management tips and resources from the 2 Peas and a Dog blog.
Back to school again! I feel this way every August. This September will be my tenth year teaching middle school in Ontario, Canada. The time has flown by. I remember setting up my very first classroom. I had spent my summer resource shopping at every garage sale and thrift store I could find. As the years have passed I have learned what to keep and what can be purged at the end of the school year.

Classroom Management Tip

Back to school classroom management tips and resources from the 2 Peas and a Dog blog.

I am an avid proponent of seating plans. Students need consistent routines and structure to be successful. Seating plans can be time-consuming to create for the teacher, and they can cause students to be upset when they are not sitting with their friends.

Last year I mixed up my seating plans by changing up how I made the seating plan. Some days I would randomly number the desks, and then assign students numbers as they walked into the room. Other days I would hand out half of a card from a deck of cards and the students had to find the matching half taped to a desk.

Eventually the numbers would rub off the desks, or the cards would get bent. I did not want to keep having to number desks or buy new decks of cards. I also wanted a system that would allow for easy group creation for group work.

Back to school classroom management tips and resources from the 2 Peas and a Dog blog.

This summer, I created flexible seating cards to solve the problems with my previous flexible seating systems. These cards can be printed out on cardstock and laminated to help them last the whole school year.

How Do The Cards Work?

1. Decide if you want to tape the desk card to your desks or just place the card on the desk before students arrive to class. Personally I find that in the upper grades too much movement happens to tape items to desks. I will just be placing the desk set on each desk, and having a student collect them before instruction begins.

2. Decide which version of the card you want students to find as their seat – numbers, pilot alphabet, deck of cards or Morse code. Then hand each student one card as they walk into the classroom. The students then have to find their new seat by matching their small card to the four square desk card. Remember to have students write down their seat symbol so you can use that to make groups if needed.

3. To easily make groups shuffle the card set you used to assign the student seats,  and make groups of 2,3,4, or 5. Show the new groups under a document camera, or by using magnets to post the cards on the board.

Find this resource on Shopify CAD and Teachers Pay Teachers USD.

Back to school classroom management tips and resources from the 2 Peas and a Dog blog.

Related Posts

Share:

4 thoughts on “Back to School: Classroom Management Tips and Resources”

  1. Making Meaning with Melissa

    Making a seating chart is one of my most dreaded teaching tasks, but I love your ideas. Can't wait to mix it up with your resource. Thank you for sharing and have a great year!

    Melissa

Leave a Comment

This FREE persuasive writing unit is

By using highly-engaging rants, your students won’t even realize you’ve channeled their daily rants and complaints into high-quality, writing!

FREE persuasive writing unit is