End classroom clutter this school year with a fun idea by Kelly, a 6th Grade Teacher, from Aberdeen, WA. Her clever idea is sure to make your students laugh and keep cleaning a top priority throughout the year. Find out how she makes cleaning and clutter elimination fun!
Controlling Classroom Clutter
To get our room clean in a jiffy, I employ a number of strategies. For starters, I regularly challenge my class to clean the room in X amount of minutes. Even my big 6th graders love to beat the clock. I also plan random desk checks and award different prizes—a cool pencil, a small food treat, a pick from the treasure box, and so on—for the neatest desk.
Also, I assign students to clean and straighten different areas in my classroom, so that the various corners and centers can be addressed simultaneously.
In addition, I find that humor helps. When materials are falling out of a desk I say, “Your desk is leaking!” I find the mess is cleaned up immediately as they chuckle at my comment.
Finally, our custodian awards a Golden Plunger weekly to the cleanest classroom. We spray painted a plunger gold and tied a bright bow around the handle. The winning class gets to display the coveted award for an entire week! Winning this award is quite an honor. Those weeks when we do not win, the kids remind each other that they need to do better so they can be awarded the plunger in the future.
How do you encourage kids to keep the classroom clutter – free?
Julie says
That is funny about the plunger. Believe it or not my students love to vacuum the floor. I go over with them before they are awarded that position that if they run over a paperclip, excess paper, or an eraser it could cause the vacuum to stop working.
This seems to heighten their awareness of how important it is to pick up before leaving!