The same routines day after day will have you in a teaching rut. So why not add a little spark into your classroom? You can bring your instruction to life with a fun construction themed room flip. It's time to "set the stage to engage" and watch your students get excited to read. Your classroom will be hard at work in no time at all. With just a few fun ideas and some construction themed decor you can transform any classroom. Make sure to grab the FREE printable that goes with this lesson too!
To get the room ready for a day of reading fun, I started transforming my students' tables. I covered them using rolls of fadeless paper. The galvanized steel and white shiplap give the tables that construction feel. I set the stage by giving my students some fun dress up items. They each received a yellow construction hat, yellow construction safety glasses and a construction crew lanyard. I also passed out construction worker vests and assigned leadership roles to the students who wore them.
In the back of the room I set up a fun little table. This served as our foreman's table. The students brought their assignments here to be checked. For a quick and easy transformation I used a construction themed tablecloth, orange cones and construction themed inflatables. This table also served as our main supply table for the activity.
Once everything was decorated I was ready for my students to join in the fun. I turned on a soundtrack of construction site noise; believe it or not there are a ton of these available on Youtube. For this activity, students worked in pairs to read our weekly story. This room flip is easy to adapt to any lesson or skill being taught, and can be adapted for multiple skills. The skill we were focusing on was identifying the main idea and supportive key details in a story. Once the students read their story they gathered their supplies. The student who wore the construction vest was the lead contractor. Their responsibility was to gather the needed supplies for the team. Their first task was to create a blueprint identifying the main ideas and 4 key details of the story. These were created using blue fadeless paper; just cut off an 11X18 section. Students used white crayons or white colored pencils to write onto their paper.
Once the blueprints were completed, the team brought them back to the foreman's table. This is where you can assess if students have mastered the skills needed in order to move on to the next phase. Cute construction cutouts are perfect for this phase. If the team finished their blue print successfully then they got a one way arrow and a reading construction zone folder. They are ready to move on! If they need to make one or two changes you can issue them a barricade. If they need several changes or they are not grasping the skill you can issue them the yield sign. They can go back and redo the assignment with some assistance from another group.
To assemble the reading construction zone folders you will need yellow file folders and the FREE construction zone printable.
Just slide the paper into the folder for your students to complete. You can even have different teams working on different skilled assignments to differentiate your instruction and customize it to your student's needs. Once your students have completed their assignments they can bring it back to be inspected. I love comparing our daily work to the activity on a construction site. Students can see that hard work takes practice and planning before it's complete. This is a great way to reinforce that concept while having a little fun along the way.
As our reading lesson came to a close I passed these fun construction themed bookmarks out as a reminder to my students to keep up the great work as they read. Teaching these vital reading skills can sometimes be boring but making it themed and interactive is a win win for both teachers and students. This engaging room flip will inspire your students to keep up the hard work!
