I have unshakable faith in children. They always show me the way. ♥

Thursday, May 7, 2009

an organizational retro-fit...

In our class, we learn a new poem every week. Some of them are songs, some of them are related to curriculum, and some of them are just for fun! We use these poems for a lot of learning experiences during the week, and the poems show up in different literacy work stations.

Organization of these poems has been a difficult, but over the past few years, I finally got smarter and hung the poems on hangers. That way, they're more accessible to the children and they're easier to store.

The problem? Once we get more than eight hangers on the chart stand, it's easy for them to slip off the edges as the children flip through.


So, here was my solution: masking tape a small block to the top of the chart stand so the hangers hit the block and don't slide off. Useful? Yes. Elegant? No.

Has anyone else faced a similar problem? How have you solved it? (Or, for those of you reading that may not have experience with this -- do you have any suggestions?)

3 comments:

Jenny said...

I'd love to hear more about the various literacy stations you have for the poems. We do a poem each week but I don't feel like I have a good selection of centers with them.

I think the block idea is brilliant!

vanna/tx said...

I don't know if it's a solution or not but I use a garment rack from Target ($10) to hang my charts. The garment racks are almost identical to the fancy teacher chart stands that cost an arm and a leg, but the good thing is that they have things on each end to stop hangers from falling off.
Good luck!
Vanessa

kirsten said...

Jenny -- I've just put up a post with a couple of ideas, though I'm sure there are other teachers that have even better ideas, too!

Vanessa -- thank you so much for the suggestion! I may indeed invest in one of those later on down the line. ♥