End of Year Cleaning

With the Kiddos:  I’m a firm believer that, “You helped make the mess, so you’ll help clean it up!”  Therefore, my first grades always help clean the room at the end of the year.  It took me many years to figure out that a visual would help make the process (1) easy to understand, (2) easy to know who’s in charge, and (3) easy to see what’s left to do.  Below are a few pages from our SMARTboard file that I use on our cleaning day.  Other tasks they help with are locker clean out and table top cleaning (Magic Erasers).

You can download the “Cleaning Day SMARTboard File – 

Without the Kiddos:  At our school, EVERYTHING is removed from the each room, and then the floors are stripped and waxed.  It’s a great time to sort, organize and purge.  I do this twice actually, once in June, for final end of the year cleanup, and once in August, when I’m planning/arranging the new room set up.  Once the floors are waxed, they then put everything will-nilly into the room again.  It’s a B-I-G task to reorganize the room, but I like that I’m forced to touch everything and think through the room layout.  I like to change it up from year to year anyway!  Below you’ll see a before and after picture of our June cleaning.  I took the picture with a panorama app on one of our iPads.

Last Day of School:  Here you see the room prior to our end of year cleaning routine.

Day After Last Day of School:  Here you see the room ready for maintenance.  They always come in during the summer and remove EVERYTHING from the room.  The floors get a good cleaning and waxing.

Day After Waxed Floors:  Here you see the room after it has been cleaned (floors).  This is a great time to think about room arrangement and start with a clean slate!