I didn’t bother with a classroom reveal last year, because frankly, my classroom was a bit underwhelming. After a year of dodging reckless drivers on I-40, I decided the risk of flaming death was just a little too high for my comfort, so in the spring of 2024, I applied for a job teaching sixth-grade ELA at a school much closer to home. It was a great assignment, except for one glaring problem: I couldn’t convince the upper-level administrators to let me paint my room, so I had to settle for fairy lights and whimsical bulletin boards. The kids and their parents were impressed, but I wasn’t. Temporary wall hangings feel hopelessly liminal to me, and liminal spaces have an aura of wrongness about them that no amount of wishful thinking will overcome.
After my kids posted stellar scores on the middle-of-year benchmark test, I went to our then-superintendent — who was new to the district and very enthusiastic about Doing Things Differently, and whose support I’d been cultivating for several months — and asked again.
Welcome to the enchanted forest, where dragon puppies frolic below a whiteboard, a deceptively cute kelpie dips a toe into a stream running next to my desk, a spooky old tree sports a clutch of raven’s eggs and a likely portal to the Otherworld (conveniently tucked out of sight under a worktable), and the bookcases lean against the stone remnants of some long-forgotten castle, watched over by a raven who may or may not be* an incarnation of a Celtic battle goddess. In a nod to my Potterheads, I also tucked Hagrid’s hut into a little clearing behind some evergreens, and there’s enough open space here and there for me to add flourishes later if the mood strikes me.
The kids love it, and it’s making the workstation format that I’m using this year way more fun than it has any right to be. Three days a week, the kids work in small groups, rotating to a different workstation each day — one focused on writing, one on mechanics, and one on reading. The reading station is in the corner, where they sit on log-slice pillows atop a fluffy green carpet and relax while they learn to annotate the stories they read. On Thursdays, we do whole-group activities, and the kids who are all caught up on their work get to sit on the same carpet and read to my three-legged spaniel mix, Pearl, who was certified as a therapy dog last year. (I’ll have another post on that soon.)
If you can convince your administration to let you paint murals in your classroom, I highly recommend it. A little creativity makes a big difference.
Emily
* Is, of course. My master’s thesis was a novel about a 10-year-old banshee who discovers she is the latest incarnation of the Morrigan. Shapeshifting is one of her powers, and — in keeping with Celtic mythology — she frequently takes the form of a raven.
Foolish Wand-Waving 