How I got my catchphrase (or End of Class Routines)

Every day my students spend a lot of time working hard, moving about the room, collaborating, and engaging with the material. At the beginning of my career, my room would always look like a total mess when the kids left and I was always frustrated! I thought “Why can't these students, 10 to 13-year-olds, clean up after themselves?” 

That is when I realized I needed end-of-the-class procedures and I needed to explicitly teach students how they cleaning up after themselves and getting ready to leave. 

A lot has changed since those first few years and I have gotten much better about teaching routines explicitly and students have gotten better about cleaning up after themselves. 

I bet you are wondering about how all of this connects to my catchphrase. Well, my end-of-the-class procedures have become so routine that my students have memorized what I say! Students have even drawn me pictures about it and it has become a nice inside joke. 

Every day, I have an alarm set on my phone for about 5 minutes before class is supposed to end. I do this for every class. I even do this for my lunch! This way I know when I need to start wrapping things up and helping kids clean up the space. 

My timer goes off and I know that I have five minutes to wrap it up and if we are working, this is when I tell students to start packing things up and putting things away.

Then I make sure I explicitly tell students what I want them to do and this is where the catchphrase comes in. I will tell students  "Make sure everything is put away! Nothing on the tables, nothing on the floors. I want my room spotless."

My students have gotten so used to me saying this but they have started chiming in when we get to the “I want my room spotless” part. So, imagine an entire room of 13-year-olds all saying it at the same time! It starts to really sink in!

 Finally, I move around the classroom as they are cleaning up to make sure things are getting done. I will tell students “Hey you forgot to push in your chair” or “Hey there's a piece of paper on the floor. can you pick that up?”

Sometimes I get pushback from students who don't want to pick something up unless it was theirs. I'll hear things like “Oh that isn't mine. I don't need to clean it up” or “I didn't make that mess.” It's as if this is some excuse for them to get away with not having to help take care of our classroom. Most of the time I just tell them, “I'm old and I have a really bad back so I could really use your help here.”

 This is also a great time to work on classroom community and school culture. Listen to take pride in their school and classroom and want to help make it look nice and clean in the best place that I can be.

 When I hear students say something like this that tells me that I need to do some SEL work. But that is a blog post for another day!