Décor - Ironing Board Covers

Worn-out and/or hideous ironing board covers in your classroom? Make your own! Very similar to upgrading your desk chair. Turn ironing board upside down on fabric of your choice and trace around, adding approximately 4 inches all around. Cut, sew casing, insert elastic, fit to board. You can leave the old pad on or make your own from fleece, an old blanket, etc. Gives a whole new look to your classroom!

 Hideous, stained, worn-out ironing board cover.

FABULOUS ironing board covers! I can't decide which one is my favorite.

Décor – Pimp My Desk Chair

Time for a little fun - some ideas for classroom decor. Have an old, shameful-looking desk chair? Reupholster it! It's a much easier task than you might think. Choose a fabric that can take a little abuse and won't wear or fade quickly. Remove the cushions and trace around them onto fabric adding about 4 inches all around. Create a casing, insert elastic, fit around cushions, reassemble chair. Presto – “brand new” chair, in your choice of covering!

Ugly chair!

Home Ec teachers can't have ripped chairs!

Fun fabric...

Cover ugly fabric...

Ta-da!!!

Sewing room chair (this gets addictive).

Make-Up Work

How many hours we would save if all students were here every day! I have several procedures in place to allow students to be as independent as possible in obtaining their make-up work. First, the week’s schedule is written on the board, so they can check there to see what they missed. Second, the current copy of the Table of Contents is located at the front of the room for them to find the titles of any documents they may be missing. Finally, any handouts/notes/etc that are given out, I toss in their binders the day they are gone – since all of the absentees’ binders are still in the crate, this is easily accomplished in less than a minute. Truly takes the headache out of having to continuously pull out make-up work!

Notes

A note on notes – we do take a fair amount of notes in my classes, not in small part due to the fact that our textbooks are so outdated! I use skeleton notes, which assists the students in staying organized (particularly those students with related accommodations). Their binders of notes more or less become their textbooks for reviewing and studying. 

Binders

All teachers know that paper flow is a tricky beast to manage, and teachers with several different preps like many of us FACS teachers have to make a little extra effort. I’ve found it works well to make the students keep all materials in one place – a class binder. I provide the binders for all students at the beginning of the year – not cheap, but then there are no excuses not to have one, and since they’re all the same size they fit together much better. I make an address-sized label for each student’s binder on the side with their first name, then place a 2” x 4” label with their full name, the name of the class, and the school mascot on the front of the binder (nice personal touch).

At the beginning of the year I provide them with a blank “Table of Contents” form, and copies of the course syllabus, rules, and procedures to keep in the binder. All notes that they take and a majority of their short assignments are kept in the binder, and students must keep track of all items on their Table of Contents.

I provide a crate for each class to keep their binders in (each crate’s color corresponds to the class’s assigned color, naturally).

Still looking for a yellow crate!

I grade the binders every one to two weeks, using the ToC page – if they don’t record something on that page, it doesn’t get graded. I keep a current copy of the ToC at the front of the room so that they can double check it before it’s do, and I also project it two or three times a week for them to add what they may have missed (I LOVE having a projector in my classroom! How did I live without one?).

Protective sleeves to guard against grimy teen paws.

Color-Coded Tables of Contents!

The advantages for them are that they always have all of their notes, and that I let them use their binders on parts of their tests. All tests have two parts: one must be memorized, the other is open binder. As you can imagine, most of the binder part of the test is application and critical thinking. 

Speaking of tests: rather than hand back tests, quizzes, papers, etc, etc, individually, I just place graded work in the front pockets of the binders along with a grade printout once a week. Saves plenty of class time!

Handouts

You can never predict when the copy machine will break down or when there will be a long line, so most teachers learn quickly it’s best to do as much copying as far in advance as you can. The trouble then sometimes becomes where to store all of those handouts so that you can easily find them when you need them. I keep a small crate at the front of the classroom with about six or seven file folders of each class’s color, and keep that week’s documents in there – easily available, low transition time. Any “leftovers” go into the folders in the filing cabinet, and then they rotate in the following week.

Class Color-Coding

In addition to color-coding the kitchens, I also color-code each class (Foods = blue, Resource Management = green, etc). All important documents (syllabi, rules, rubrics, etc) for each class are copied onto paper that class’s color, all copies of notes/assignments/tests/etc are kept in matching colored hanging files in my filing cabinet, etc. This makes it very easy for me to recognize paperwork at a glance, or find documents quickly.

Job Wheel

There are a few extra tasks that need to be completed during cooking lab clean-up that fall outside of the individual kitchens, and I much prefer to put the kidoodles in charge of these than do them myself. To fairly create a job rotation, I made this job wheel which I change every cooking day:

TABLE – clean off the ingredient table (close lids/boxes/containers, wipe off table)
FLOORS – use the big 3 foot broom to sweep ALL of the kitchens
TOWELS – make sure all towels are in the washing machine, add detergent, start cycle
POWER – check all kitchens to make sure all appliances are turned off

The kids are great about checking the wheel and taking care of business!

Dishwashing Soap

One thing that all new Family & Consumer Science teachers learn within their first two cooking labs is that if you put a full bottle of dishwashing soap out in each of the kitchens, the kids go through it like no tomorrow. For a while I used the smaller bottles and just refilled them from a larger bottle – it got the job done, but the outer labels tended to get pretty gunky after a while. Then I found this fabulous idea from http://facsideas.blogspot.com/ - use craft bottles! Definitely a “why didn’t I think of that???” kind of moment. Fill these up part way and they last for several labs, the squeeze tops prevent extra soap from running down the sides, and they are very easy to clean. Thank you Shelley!

Garbage Cans

This is a departure from the “Color-Coding” theme, but a good tip. I set all of my garbage cans/recycling bins on top of chairs. As we’ve all noticed many high school kids are apparently just a little too tall to be able to successfully navigate trash INSIDE the trash can. They are also so tall that they can’t see their garbage all the way down there on the floor. Raising the trash receptacles to hand level eliminates 99% of that nonsense.

And yes, it is definitely time to take out the recycling!