Mumble about Sinks

Despite having three wonderful, separate sink areas in the art room, my students and I all gravitate to the low sink at the right of the room. 

Today, at clean-up with my 4th graders who had major paint stuff to clean, I, out of the blue, assigned each of my three table "islands" their own sink. The helpers dealing with cleaning up all of the water containers received rights to the low sink. WOW! It was awesome. No traffic jams, no impatient hands washing hands over hands. And all three sinks were being utilized. I've always joked that it's funny how certain parts of a classroom (and our homes) are more lived in and it's tough to utilize all of the wonderful spaces, today was a success in that sense! mumble, mumble.

Low Sink

Other two sinks

Art Room Jobs

We are enjoying our art room jobs this year. After thinking about the daily jobs that we do in the art room, I listed the six most frequent tasks. Last year I had a "helper table" that helped with everything that day. This year, I am giving each table a job to do each week. The color for each job stays the same for the entire week for all of my classes to make it manageable. If we are not painting, the table that would handle washing the brushes does "quality control". Otherwise, my job is quality controller. 

So far, the kids seem excited for all of the jobs and are taking pride in them.