The second way I look to students for organizational help is as studio assistants. I don't know any art teacher that doesn't have students that want to help them around the art room. I took advantage of this and created studio assistant jobs. Fifth grade teachers allow me to schedule my assistants for 15 minutes at the end of the day. Students filled out an application and selected what type of job they want to do. I took the time to teach the jobs to the students they can work independently and I can continue working on whatever I'm doing. Below is the application I created.

Table Jobs

As I was pondering things I could do differently to help me keep things in order I came up with two plans involving my students.  The first change was to my clean up procedure. This year I assigned each seat at my color coated tables a specific job that they will maintain for the year. I know a lot of teachers rotate jobs but I figured if they're doing the job the whole year clean up should go smoothly. I have four seats at each table and came up with these four jobs:
(**Photos coming soon!**)
1.  Pencil Exchanger- These students take the 4 pencils from their pencil basket and exchange them for new pencils from my sharpened pencils cups.
2. Portfolio Collector-These students returns the table's portfolio to the labeled shelf.
3. Supply Collector- These students return the supplies to the supply shelf.
4. Floor Inspector- These students make sure that there's nothing on the floor and any scraps from the table are put away.
I attempted to use a mission impossible song slip during clean up time but students would run when they knew the song was coming to an end so I went back to my 5,4,3,2,1 countdown. I really like the idea of a song I think perhaps I just need to find a slightly longer song.

Setting Goals

This school year I had to set classroom and personal goals.  My classroom goal is to be an organized art teacher. I want to shed the feeling of having a studio that is "organized chaos" to a studio that is just plain organized. My personal goal is to work on my own art work throughout the school year. I'm starting this blog to help document my progress and hopefully help other art teachers that want to become more organized too!