I was born to be a teacher. No matter how many times throughout my life that I considered various career paths, I always came back to teaching. Once I had field experience in high school, I was set: I was going to be a teacher. I love kids so much, and I just love being someone that kids will look up to and I can’t wait to create a place for students to feel comfortable. I’m a special ed major, and I’ve put a lot of thought into how I want my classroom to be designed. So even though no one asked, this is how I want my first classroom to look, even though it is a little far-fetched for the real world.
I have a theme in mind and everything: modern farmhouse. The colors are black, dark green, and wooden brown. Everything is going to have rustic wood borders, and my students will have name tags on cute farm animals. There will be little hanging chalkboards with cute sayings all around the room, and the board at the front will have cute leafy borders around it. I’ll have the alphabet in little circles with leaves around them across the top of walls. The sign language for each letter will be included below it. There will be a bunch of lamps around the room, so I don’t have to keep the overhead lights on. I plan to also have each kid plant a small succulent and take care of it throughout the year. These will be located on a table under a window.
I also want to have a “check-in” board, where at the beginning of each class the students will place a sticky note under a category: great, good, meh, not-so-great, and something along the lines of “I could use some help.” This way, I’ll have a subtle way to check-in on my students and they’ll have a simple way to reach out if they want. I’m also going to have a huge green rug on the floor so we can have a place to read books on Fridays. Each Friday, I hope to have one kid bring in a book and read it to the class. Yet, I would never force a child to read aloud to the class. I’ll have super cute bookshelves with lots of great, inclusive books and a small toy box with lots of play-doh so they can have something to fidget with if they need to.
There are so many other ideas that I want to include, but that’s a pretty good start. I’m so excited to be a teacher, and I can’t wait to be in the classroom surrounded by kids all day.