Classrooms should be well-organized and make sense. They should flow with the flow of activities during the day. If your classroom is more complicated and/or not quite as organized, you need to take another look at how to make your room work for you. Here are a few tips to help you make your classroom more "feng shui" and less "no idea where to put that." 

Examine Your Daily Schedule 

All classrooms have a daily schedule. Where are you holding small group lessons for reading? Do you have a designated science lab area and is it easy to get to when science class starts? Essentially, you want all the areas in your room to flow from one subject to the next and to move the kids from one subject and activity to the next. Organize your room so that every time there is a transition to another subject, you can simply move around the room like the hands of a clock. Whether you choose to move clockwise or counterclockwise is up to you, but pick a direction and stick with it when organizing everything in the room. The children's own desks should be in the center of it all. 

Do a Classroom Walkthrough

If you were one of your students, can you get up from any desk and go to a specified area with little trouble? Can you move from one area to the next easily, but not so easily as to make chaos a possibility? Walk around the room as though you are conducting each hour of class time during a typical class day and see if it flows well. If it does flow well, you have done an excellent job at organizing your room in a way that will make sense to your pupils and keep order during class time transitions. Consider getting outside help to conduct the classroom walkthrough for more help. 

Try Unique Organizations of Desks

Teachers tend to get creative with how desks are organized. This is a good thing because then students are already sitting together for group projects and group activities. Group kids by four or six and in whatever space will allow a particular formation. If you just place your desks in straight rows at the beginning of the year, it may be easier for students to find where they sit, but it will also cause problems if and when you ask the kids to pair up or team-up. If you want, start with the rows and then reorganize the desks into "pods" by kids who need to be placed apart from each other to end behavioral issues.

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