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School's Out- Time to Second Guess Plans for Next Year

This time of year is always a little bitter sweet. It is of course nice to go on to a long summer break, but as I pack up my classroom, I cannot help but start planning for next year. The most immediate concern is the supplies. I have been teaching for 11 years now, and every year I seem to struggle more with my supply order. For one, I always worry that I will forget some basic supply and start the year without paper or something like that, but also, it seems like every year I feel like I blow through my budget faster and faster. The irony of this is of course that every year, I have more money to work with. I am incredibly fortunate to have a generous budget from my school, a generous allowance from my parents organization and a healthy supplement to my budget thanks to Square 1 Art. If you don't use Square 1 Art, I highly recommend it. I had always stayed away from fundraisers because I am in a very privileged position and it felt greedy to ask for more, but Square 1 has been great. Some of the parents at my school actually came to me a few years ago asking if I would be willing to do it because they wanted to be able to buy phone cases and mugs etc. with their kids art on it. I reluctantly agreed to take it on, and I am so glad I did. Square 1 is so organized it is super easy to implement and it basically doubles my budget.

Now looking at supplies for next year, I teach about 550 students and as I move to increase choice in my curriculum, it becomes harder to predict how much I will need of everything. I know clay is going to be a biggie. Last year I went through around 1,300 pounds of clay. The shipping is what kills me more than anything else. Getting 1000 pounds of clay from Blick costs about $300 then the shipping is another $200. This year I found Great Lakes Clay which offers much lower shipping rates. They will give me 1400 pounds of clay for about the same price as 1000 from Blick. For everything else though, Blick remains my go-to vendor. The main reason is that their brand of products is by far the highest quality generics I have ever found. I always buy the Blick brand for colored pencils, chalks, paint, paper etc. I do splurge a bit with my sulfite and buy the 80 pound paper. If you do a lot with wet media, and you don't want the paper curling, the heavier paper is well worth it. For paints, I like to give kids options, so I get Prang watercolors in standard sets as well as their glitter and metallics. I get tempera cakes in the 9 color set and fluorescents (Richeson brand is much better than Alpha biggie cakes because of the quality of the tray). I also get liquid temperas and liquid watercolors. All that paint can get pretty expensive and I keep going back and forth on whether it is worth it to buy so much. My thought is that having all of these supplies in slightly different forms is critical to help students learn to evaluate and make the best choices of media. Increasingly often, I am structuring lessons posing a design challenge and expecting students to select the best tools for the task.

Now the next thing I am going to agonize over is organization of all the materials. I know it is fairly common in a TAB classroom to arrange centers for different media, but I've always hated working in centers. I know it offers opportunities for peer support as kids with similar interest explore the same media together, but I think an equally compelling argument could be made that by having students with different media sitting together, they can learn from comparisons and make different connections considering a wider range of possibilities. I've tried arranging my class with supply boxes out on the tables, but in my experience, they become too disorganized and to some extent get in the way as unused supplies take up valuable real estate on the table when kids are working. My current thought is having a supply table in the center of the room will work best or possibly a few supply stations with similar materials grouped together (a paint supply station, a drawing media supply station, a clay supply station etc.) that way I won't have too much congestion at one supply table.

I'll spend my summer planning, and second guessing my plans. I'll be posting infrequently during the summer, but in August, I'll post along with pictures of the classroom to show how I settle on arranging everything.

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