Scholarly Orderly Chaos

Just sitting here reflecting, as I often do, on my classroom. One of the aspects that I was thinking on, was on what some unenlightened soul could perceive as "chaos" in my classroom. It is anything but!!

There are times when they are sitting and quietly working, but there are times when we:

1.  get up and converse with other classmates about what we read during our silent reading time

2.  get up and converse with other classmates about the math that we're working on

3.  take several "30 seconds to stretch" breaks throughout the day

4.  are scattered all over the floor with personal rugs, pillows, or on the larger area rugs to read

5.  are up and moving and dancing to the beat of some educational rap/rap video

6.  are up and moving to a wall or corner of the room where the answer to some question I asked
about grammar or figurative language is posted on construction paper in the teacher's handwriting

7.  when we just sit quietly and doodle after lunch, in the dark, with filtered light from the sun and the sound of WRTI 90.1 FM's classical music playing in the background

8.  are doctors performing sentence surgery on sick sentences

9. quickly make our way back to our seats as the teacher counts down from 5 with the warning starting with "original seats in 5, 4..." or to the tune of a preschool song, "Everybody take a seat, take a seat, take a seat! Everybody take a seat, right in your chair. Not in the ceiling, not in the air, everybody take a seat right in your chair"

Chaos for lack of classroom management? No sir! Scholarly Orderly Chaos!