Take A Seat - The Art Of Tables

Freshly painted walls this year make the room so much bigger and brighter!

Fourth stop on my room tour - the seating arrangement!

I usually have 22 students in a class and there are 6 large tables with 4 stools for them to be seated. Last year I suffered by letting my students pick their seats and then having to revoke that privilege for those who just couldn't handle that responsibility. This year I started off with seating assignments AND table jobs. Students seem to be enjoying this arrangement and my head hasn't exploded from trying to figure out who can(not) handle sitting where.

Table jobs and each table numbers.

Just this year I decided to implement table jobs. After two weeks managing materials, artworks, and cleanup... I can say this is one of the best decisions of my career. Seriously. In an ideal world, students would be able to take responsibility for their own materials, their own project, and leave the room as nice as they found it, if not better. Alas, giving 22 kids a 5-minute window for cleanup and not having some kind of miscommunication happen was a rarity. Students would inevitably put their artwork in the wrong place, try to keep working, run/slip/trip, put hand soap on sponges for wiping the table (grr!), or something that never even occurred to me as a possibility after I had carefully explained the cleanup procedure. Sometimes cleanup went fine but there is just too much turnover in the art room to cheerfully accommodate the disasters listed above. At the end of the year, I was worn out and frustrated. There had to be a better way. 

This year, I got my butt in gear during my prep days and gave assigned seats with jobs for each student. These jobs are the same at every table:

• Supply Tracker: the only person who collects/returns materials for the whole table at the beginning/end of work time. This prevents a stampede of students to grab or return materials and saves me from racing around the room before a class arrives trying to put out the things they need.
• Artwork Curator: the only person who touches artwork at the end of the lesson. I have this person make sure everyone put their name and class code on the back of their work, return sketchbooks to the shelf at the front of the room, and make sure wet artwork is on the drying rack or dry work is in the class drawer. 
• Table/Floor Cleaner: the only person who can grab a wet-with-water (not hand soap - grr!) sponge to wipe tables as well as the one who makes sure scraps and materials aren't left out. 
• Noise Monitor/Sub: secretly, this is my favorite person at the table because they shush people who are noisy during work time and they are on quality controller duty during clean up. They are also the ones that do someone else's job when they are absent or if you don't have a full table. Teacher tip: make your most irresponsible and/or talkative students fill this role. It might not always work but it could help channel their extra energy into being helpful rather than disruptive.

A little smudged since we've been using oil pastels this week!

Each table also has a sign in the middle with the table number, a major artwork we will be studying, and biographic information of the painting. I chose to feature works by Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali, as well as an example of Aboriginal art and Arabic design. I hope that exposure to these artworks will familiarize students with diverse art styles and help them recognize major works someday. It's also easier to call table groups to line up at the end of class than individuals. Table groups are also responsible for each other so they exert peer pressure on each other to follow expectations so they may line up quickly.

What are some other helpful table jobs that can be assigned in the art room?

Artfully,

Catherine