Starting a New Teaching Job on a Limited Budget

When I started teaching full time I had very little money. I’d done relief work and one short contract before taking on this full time role. And it was a contract for one term only - I had no idea whether it would be extended or not. So there wasn’t a lot of money to spend on setting up a classroom.

With the ABC News article about a new teacher spending hundreds of dollars on preparing for the first day of school, I thought it was worthwhile looking at how you can set up a warm, welcoming and prepared for learning classroom when you’ve got a limited budget.

The Bare Minimum

What’s the bare minimum you need for a new teaching job? It depends from person to person, but my bare minimum would include a broad brimmed hat for outside, some sort of planner and a pencil case or two.

It’s worth investing in the hat as a piece of safety equipment (and get a sun safe one over a fashionable one) - protecting your skin on playground duty, during sports events or those times when you need to get outside is 100% worth it. 

You can completely plan on your computer . . . but computers and school computer systems aren’t always reliable. A physical planner (or even a notebook) can give you a place to jot down a few notes when you have to fall back onto the old technology. Having a pencil case with some of your favourite pens (well named so they’ve got a chance of getting back to you!) and scissors and glue also gives you tools for any occasion. A spare pencil case with spare pencils, erasers and a sharpener can help for students who don’t have the tools they need to learn.

Finding Free Resources

Looking for more for your classroom, but your budget is spent? Ask if your school has a resource room or teacher resources as part of the library. I remember discovering the poster drawer in our school library - all the posters you could even need to decorate a room. The resource room was also filled with maths tools and science tools - all free for my class to borrow.

You can also use the school library for books in your classroom or talk to your local public library about whether they’ve got special conditions for teacher borrowing.

Don’t forget about free resources on Teachers Pay Teachers - searching for poster and narrowing the search to ‘free’ gave me more than 50 000 results. Bloggers might also have free resources available by signing up with their email list - like the Galarious Goods resource library!

Buying Affordably

What do you really need - or would really like - in your classroom? It’s worthwhile reflecting on this before you spend a lot of money. Then look for ways to buy these items affordably.

Op shops or thrift shops are GREAT for finding treasures. They’re especially reliable for books (and if you have one of the amazing Lifeline Bookfests near you, it’s even better) and you can easily build a small second hand collection, saving money for the special books. It’s also worthwhile looking at some of the bigger op shops for furniture - I found a great second hand bookshelf one year which I painted and put in my classroom. Don’t forget to look at their homewares or bric a brac or toy sections for other possible treasures.

Keep an eye on back to school sales in big shops like Kmart, Big W, Aldi and Office Works to find bits and pieces - but use catalogues and lists to stop overbuying!

If you’re looking to use fabric for displays or to cover furniture, choose your fabric carefully. Poplin - which is a great, light fabric is often quite affordable, as is some of the homeware fabrics for furniture. It’s worth browsing some of the lower cost fabric shops like East Coast Fabrics or The Remnant Warehouse in Australia for specials too.

Buying Thoughtfully

Are you interested in having a themed classroom? One way to achieve this on a limited budget is to pick a very broad theme - it might be rainbow or colourful, nature or the colour blue. You can add these touches to the classroom without having to go all out and it will still bring your theme to life. And it allows you to make changes as the years go by and trends change.

Falling in love with teaching ideas and items on Instagram? Stop and think about whether those teaching ideas will really work for you, in the classroom space you have and with the grade level you have. It’s ok to let ideas go through to other teachers! Also ask yourself if you can put purchases off for a little bit - can you buy a fancy lanyard later in the year when you have some pay saved? Can you make a list of things you’d like to add to the classroom later on once you know your students better?

Don’t forget - classes change all the time in the first weeks of school! In my first term, I went from a Year 4 class to a Year 3/4 class once Day 8 numbers came in. The next year I moved from 6/7 to a straight 7 and the year after that from 6/7 to 5/6 - I never took a class list as set in stone! Unfortunately this is also the time when teachers might also lose their new contracts or may be moved to other schools. Be prepared for any possibility in the first weeks of school.

What Really Matters?

In the end, it isn’t what is on your walls or floors which really matters - it’s what you’re teaching. My son’s prep teacher had very little classroom decoration on the first day of school. Instead she filled her walls with student work - celebrating everything they were doing and rotating it as new work was produced. Students loved taking their parents to see their latest work - they were so proud of what they’d achieved.

It’s totally ok to have the bare minimum when it comes to decoration and to allow your students to create the classroom space. It’s also ok to save your money for resources which will support you as a teacher, whether they’re resources which support your weaker subjects (I always needed more science support!), resources which make your life a little easier when you need them day after day or resources which bring a particular book or subject to life.

What are your back to school savings tips? Share them in the comments!

Related posts to read:

• 6 Fabulous Blog Posts for New Teachers

• 5 Ways to Find Joy in Your Classroom and Teaching

• 5 First Day of School Blog Posts to Inspire You

• Finding Communities to Support Us as Teachers

• 5 Things School Parents Might Worry About (And how teachers can help those worries)

Looking for more?

• Follow the Galarious Goods TpT shop

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Using Back to School Reading Tools in Your Classroom

We all understand how important reading is in the classroom. But how can we ensure we make reading important from the very first day of school?  Here’s some tools you can use to create a reading friendly environment in your classroom as part of your back to school preparations!

1. Tools to assess where students are

• Unless you’re teaching first year of school students or students who are new to the school, it’s likely that your students have participated in reading testing - they might even have a reading level recorded. Don’t ignore this! Use this as a launch pad for your own reading testing.

• Your school probably has a system of reading testing. If you’re new to the school (or to teaching) ask around to find out what it is and jump into it as soon as you can (it can be a HUGE job). If your school doesn’t have a testing system, grab a couple of texts (easier, at grade level and harder) and ask students to read them to you individually. This gives you a starting place to work from.

• As well as assessing reading level, consider assessing how your students feel about reading. Do they like reading? What do they like reading? Where do they like reading? When do they like reading? What are their past experiences with reading? By asking these questions, you’re showing students that their experiences and feelings about reading are real and valid, and getting a better introduction into the reading life of your students.

2. Tools for setting goals.

• Before you set reading goals with students, you might like to spend some time exploring what reading goals might look like. Students might focus on reading levels or skill attainment, and that’s great, but student reading goals can also look like the reading goals of adults. Students might like to engage in a reading challenge to try different books, work towards reading a certain number of books, aim to write book reviews for some of the books they’re reading or participate in book discussions with their classmates.

• Students should reflect on what their goal would look like and how they’d know that they achieved it. This might mean creating a recording chart for their goal or they might write a journal reflecting on the work they’re doing to achieve their goal.

• Don’t forget to ask students what they’ll need to achieve their goal. For some students it will be access to a wide range of books. Others will need time to read or materials to draw up their recording chart. Some might need to learn how to write a book review, or how to use a dictionary effectively. This is a great discussion to have in individual reading conferences allowing students to make choices and take responsibility, while also showing them that you care about their reading goal

3. Tools for creating the environment

• What does your classroom tell your students about reading? Stand in the doorway and look in. Have you got any books on display? Have you got a classroom library or a reading corner? Are there posters about reading or books? Think about what message you want students to get about reading as they walk into the classroom and see if there’s anyway to make those messages obvious.

• Establishing a whole classroom library can be expensive, but choosing a few books to display can still prioritise reading without breaking the budget. Your school library or local public library may have a selection of books, and you can coordinate these with subjects you’re going to cover in history or science. 

• There are so many posters related to reading which you can display in your classroom. You might include posters of book covers, posters recommending different books, posters with book genres. You might have posters with sayings or quotes about reading. Printable posters (like these ones) can be found easily at TeachersPayTeachers, then printed and laminated to use year after year. 

• Creating a reading corner is another way to show students that you prioritise reading. A reading corner might be themed and decorated, but it might just include somewhere to sit, some posters and a collection of books.

• Don’t forget to include written recommendations in your classroom! You might start with recommendations from yourself, or you could include recommendations from other teachers in the school, your own family members - even your family pet! (Our chickens are fond of  The Fabulous Friend Machine by Nick Bland). Recommendations don’t have to be long - a line or two could be enough to grab the attention of a curious reader.

4. Tools to make reading fun

• Is reading fun in your classroom? Before the school year starts, think of some activities to bring reading alive for your students.

• Students might like to incorporate STEM with reading and design a book holding machine (so you can eat and read at the same time) or design a way of keeping books safe in the rain.

• You might like to have some funny and engaging books ready for the first day of school. Take a little time to read the first few pages - or a particularly funny bit - aloud, then offer the book for students to read (or create a list for read alouds throughout the year)

• Allow students the chance to explore some of the books they might like to read that year. Work with your school librarian to explore the library or hold a book tasting in your classroom. 

How do you embrace reading at the beginning of the school year? Share your tips and ideas in the comments!

Related posts to read:

• 5 Ways to Find Joy in Your Classroom and Teaching

• 5 First Day of School Blog Posts to Inspire You

• 5 Great Reads for Teachers Setting Goals

• Finding Communities to Support Us as Teachers

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4 Ways to Use Songs To Make Your Lessons Sing

Some of my earliest memories of school include singing songs and using chants to remember what I was learning. (A is for Apple, A, A, A is still imprinted on my mind!). Songs are a wonderful way to help students understand and remember different learning topics - so where can we find them and how can we used them in the classroom?

Luckily for us, we live in the time of the internet and YouTube! This allows us almost instant access to some amazing educational songs which we can play right to our classes. One of my favourite bands for educational songs is They Might Be Giants. They have a couple of educational albums including Here Comes the ABCs and Here Comes the 123s, but the one I've used the most is Here Comes Science - I have a strange love for their Solid Liquid Gas song!

Schoolhouse Rock is a classic example of educational songs for a reason - even outside of the United States it's likely that you've heard at least some of their songs. These songs were originally created when an advertising executive realised that his son could remember all the lyrics to songs even though he was having trouble remembering multiplication tables. There's lots of songs available covering a range of topics - in English, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies.

There are also a really wide range of teacher and student created educational songs! Some educators and classes have been incredibly creative with how they've explored a topic and they've been kind enough to share their creations with the internet.

But how can we use educational songs in the classroom?

1. Introduce New Topics and Gain Interest

Songs can be a wonderful way to introduce a new topic to a class. It may be directly connected to the topic you're going to be covering (like the Solid Liquid Gas song when you're about to explore solids, liquids and gases) or it might be indirectly connected (like protest songs when you're covering the Vietnam War and reactions to it). Students can just listen to the song, watch a music video or examine the lyrics. They may note new vocabulary, discuss what they think they're going to learn, or make connections to topics they've already covered or knowledge they already have.

2. Reinforce Facts, Events or Processes

Once students have been introduced to new topics or ideas, songs can assist in reinforcing them. This can be particularly useful for things which need to be memorised, like mathematical facts or formulas or historical dates. It may also offer an alternative way of looking at a topic - something which can be very useful for some students who are having difficulty with the way the material has been covered. 

3. Prompt Questioning and Further Exploration

While songs can definitely tell a story or provide information, their structure and length - and the fact that many are written for entertainment - means that inevitably parts are left out. This is great for us as teachers though, because we can use songs to prompt further questioning and exploration - did George Washington and Alexander Hamilton really have a close working relationship like they did in Hamilton? Why did Constantinople become Istanbul? What is the story told in From Little Things Big Things Grow?

Students can brainstorm these questions while listening to the songs, annotate on the lyrics of the songs or use a display board to add questions to as they learn more about the song and the events or ideas it describes.

Looking for a song about a historical event? This Genius list includes a lot of them - though not all would be appropriate for the classroom, so check them out first.

4. Create Your Own Songs

Can't find a good song for the topic you're covering? Then write your own (or ask your students to write one for you!)

Creating a song for your students, or having your class work together or in small groups to write songs can help to refine the topic you're teaching and really concentrate on what's important. Students need to show a really good understanding of the topic to create effective songs and the process can be a great way of clarifying and assessing what they know. 

Lots of teacher and student created songs begin as parodies of well known songs - this can make life much easier because you're not having to come up with the music or the rhythm of the songs - you're just fitting words into an already created structure. Some students (and teachers!) however, may enjoy the creative freedom of coming up with a brand new song.

This step by step guide is a great place to start if you're considering writing your own educational songs.

Whether you're just listening, taking an in-depth look at educational songs as part of your teaching or planning on becoming the next Schoolhouse Rock, educational songs are a great way of adding interest and memorability to your lessons. It's definitely worth trying to fit them into a lesson where you can.

Related posts to read:

• 6 Fabulous Blog Posts for New Teachers

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Looking for more?

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4 High-Interest Ways to make Law-Making Lessons Fun

This post is totally inspired by a question I saw a few weeks ago - how do you teach law-making in Australia in an interesting and engaging way? How do you make sure students really understand the law-making process? How do you avoid the knowledge and understanding test and find other ways to assess student understanding.

So often you see role-playing as the only option put forward. However, although it's fun to pretend to be the Prime Minister, it's not always practical for time or space considerations. Or you may not have enough students to play all the needed parts. And some of the role-playing scripts out there are decidedly uninspiring or require a lot of explaining to allows students to understand what's going on.

So my goal was to offer an alternative! Four different ways to explore and assess law-making which don't include role-playing! (You can still pretend to be Prime Minister though)

Create or Play A Game

Passing a bill through Australian Parliaments looks like a fairly straight-forward process to start with. However, input from different interest groups or departments, media reports, backlash from the voters or disagreements in the party room can definitely throw hurdles in the way. This makes it perfect to turn into a game. 

Once students understand the basic processes of how a bill is prepared for parliament and passes through parliament, they can brainstorm possible hurdles (or helps) and consider how they might make a game board. A snakes and ladders or beginning to end style game could work very well, as could a quest like game. Or students could turn it into a human size game using hoops, large dice and A4 sized cards.

Need a Passing an Australian Bill Activity? Get yours here.

Teacher Created Option: You could create a game board, or a series of game boards or card games yourself and have them available for students to play as part of rotations or small group work.

Create a Social Media Campaign

Social media is increasingly becoming a way to share information with other people, with government departments using it to teach citizens about new laws, important public service messages and other advice they might need. It can be fun to use the structures of social media to explore ideas in the classroom, especially when students have to think about what would be attractive or what limitations they might face.

Students can share information about law-making by making videos (like YouTube), image based posts (like Instagram or Snapchat), short text posts (like Twitter) or a mixture (like Facebook). They can start with the basic information and think about how it can be summarised, what information is most important and what is the most effective way to share it. Students can plan entire social media campaigns, or focus on one element of law-making or one style of social media.

Teacher Created Option: Present the law-making information to your students in the form of social media. You might like to collect videos, images or posts which students can work through to gather information, or create your own. This can be a great process for students to think about what information is important and what isn't!

Turn it Into a Song

I think almost everyone has seen the video about how a bill becomes a law in the United States. But what about governments outside of the USA? Educational songs are surprisingly big on YouTube, with professional musicians, teachers and students creating songs to share what they know (as well as some pretty awesome videos.) So turn it over to your students and ask them to create their own songs which share all they know about the law-making process. 

Teacher Created Option: Embrace your inner Lin-Manuel Miranda and make government processes interesting with your own song. I don't guarantee you'll have a Broadway musical out of it, though . . . 

Museum Display

Museums are well known for collecting images, text, artefacts and interactive elements to share information with viewers. Challenge your students to explore one or more aspects of the law-making process by creating their own museum display. Students will need to think about what kind of images, text and artefact they might need and how they could include an interactive element, or something like video or audio. 

Teacher Created Option: A museum display on a noticeboard or a spare table can be a great way to spark questions and thinking, especially at the beginning of the unit. Students can identify vocabulary they might need, as well as information they would like to explore further.

Related posts to read:

• Elections in the Classroom - 7 Tips for Real Learning with Minimum Controversy

• Different Types of Government (And How We Can Teach Them)

• 5 Things You Need to Teach Year 4 Civics and Citizenship

• What are Election Policies? (And how can we teach students about them?)

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Classroom Organisation for the Unorganised

I wish I was one of those 'born organised' people. Sadly, I am not, and my classroom (or at least, my teacher desk) has definitely reflected my struggles to stay organised at times. But over the years I have learned a few things to help even the disorganised among us keep a more organised classroom.

1. Label Everything

Whether you use a label machine or some of the amazing looking labels you can find over at TpT, try to label everything. There's nothing better than being able to put your hands on what you need right away. Up the organisation by using colours in your labelling - you could divide your subjects by colour or your different year levels.

2. Discard When You Can

Your students have done their diagnostic tests, you've recorded their scores - do you still need to keep the test papers? Maybe you do - so file them away (more on that in a moment), but if there's no need to hold onto them, feel free to relegate them into the bin. This can apply to all sorts of papers - file or toss.

Taking a bigger look - what are you keeping in your classroom that you don't need anymore? Teachers can be champion hoarders, but consider whether you really need all your resources. Are you keeping (and not using) things that are easy to replace? Are you keeping things that you don't want to move if you get a new classroom or move to a new school? Less stuff makes it easier to keep things organised, so devote 30 minutes or so a week to removing some of the items you just don't need.

3. Get Help With Your Filing (And Other Stuff)

Have a lot of student papers which need filing? Get your students to help you. Students can definitely put their own work into folders and bring them back to you - you can even organise them to bring things back in alphabetical order.

Make sure your students also take responsibility for the classroom - it belongs to them as well. Shared work areas should be tidied before they move on to new activities and personal work areas should be tidied each day. Organisation is an important skill for studying and learning, so it's ok to bring it in as something you all learn together.

4. Provide Your Students With Personal Lists (and Make One For Yourself Too)

I spotted this one the other day and was amazed I hadn't thought of something so simple before! A new school student had a thin, laminated list of things they needed to bring to school each day attached to their bag. You can adapt this idea to steps which need to be done to organise each working area or desk. Students can refer to the lists before moving on to new activities or classes.

You can totally make one for yourself as well. What do you need to get done before class starts? Or what do you need to get done before you leave each day to make the next morning run smoothly? Even a list of things you can do when you have 5 minutes spare time can help you be more organised if that happens. Writing it down means you don't have to keep it in your memory and makes it more likely that things will regularly get done.

5. Set a Timer and Check Out Pinterest

It's totally ok to learn from our more naturally organised colleagues and other naturally organised people. Set a timer for 20 or 30 minutes (so you don't get sucked into the Pinterest Vortex), create a new organisation board and get searching. Five minutes into a search on Pinterest and I'm totally making Ikea plans!

Remember not everything on Pinterest will work for you, so allow a cooling period before you go to the shops and buy a lot of expensive storage systems. Take one or two ideas and think about how they'd operate in your classroom. Think about whether you'll need to adapt them in anyway or how you can ensure you'll use them properly. Make sure you've got the best possible solutions for you!

I hope these tips can help you become more organised! Feel free to add your own organisation tips, posts or pictures in the comments!

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Looking for more?

• Follow the Galarious Goods TpT shop

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