The best part about STEM class? Watching students explore and tinker with all of the building materials. The worst part of STEM class? Gathering up all of the pieces your students missed while they avoided cleaning up those amazing materials.
Clean-up time is hard. Students want to keep building. Students want to see how many building blocks they can successfully land in the bin from ten feet away. Students want to knock over things their classmates made. Students want to tattle about who isn’t cleaning up. In short – students want to do anything except clean up!
Like all parts of my class, I always hope to keep clean-up feeling both productive and playful. To that end, I teach and use a consistent process that defines how clean-up should work without being overly prescriptive about how students tackle the actual cleaning up. Students sometimes develop games or strategies for clean-up (“How many Keva planks can I carry at one time in the bottom of my shirt?” or “How high will my stack of magnet tiles be if I organize them to carry them to the bin?”) that I try to allow whenever possible. If there’s something students can do that fits within our standard of quick and calm and makes something inherently not fun just a little more joyful, I try to support it!
Let’s look at my process in a little more detail. (Psst…You can grab a copy of the slideshow I use to introduce my clean-up process on my Free Resources page. Join my mailing list or complete the form below if you don’t have the password!)
Signaling Clean-Up:
I highly recommend selecting a consistent signal that you use only to initiate the clean-up process. In my classroom, if students hear music, they instantly know what to do, no verbal announcements required. It is powerful when students hear the music start playing and see their peers begin doing the steps in our process – and much more effective than me making an announcement that it’s time to clean-up.
If I have specific clean-up directions for the day, I will ring my chime (my announcement signal) and give those directions 3-5 minutes before clean-up time. Alternatively, I will stop in at each table during work time and give instructions or reminders for what they’ll need to do at clean-up time.
Step 1: Take a Mental Picture of What You Made
The transition to clean-up can be difficult. Teaching your students to use a “camera” to take a mental picture of their work allows them to playfully pause and honor their work while preparing themselves to shift into clean-up mode.
*Taking real photos of student work can also work here, but I find that this can unleash an avalanche of students who want me to take pictures of every little thing before they’ll tidy up. I try to reserve actual photo-taking for high quality achievements and get those images captured before clean-up time begins.
Step 2: Clean Up Everything In Your Space
A student swooping in and knocking over a peer’s creation is the number one source of tears in my classroom during clean-up time. In my clean-up process, students must first take responsibility for tidying up their own materials and workspace.
As I mentioned above, I do try to give students some leeway in how they choose to clean up their materials. As long as a technique meets the quick and calm guidelines and allows everyone to be able to hear the clean-up music, I try to allow it.
3. Ask Anyone Still Cleaning Up If They Need Help
Once a student cleans up their own materials, they can then ask a peer who is still working if they need help. When I first started teaching STEM, I was surprised by how many students don’t want help with clean-up, as they have a specific strategy in mind. To that end, when students reach this step in the process, they have to ask if their peers want help, rather than just assuming they do. If a peer declines assistance, students can ask another person or head back to their now-tidy workspace.
Tips for Implementation
- Be consistent and consistently review the process.
I teach this process from the very first class and revisit the clean-up procedure slide often. I include it in every slide deck that I make for class so that it’s there when I need it. - Teach each step individually.
During our early classes, I walk students through each step of the process in depth, modeling what it looks like so that they can internalize the flow of clean-up. Be sure to grab my free Clean-Up Time Slide Deck below, which breaks down each step for students. - Clean up alongside your students!
I always make a point to get involved with the clean-up process. It’s very helpful to be able to demonstrate that you are helping to clean up materials you didn’t use, particularly when students are reluctant to pick up a miscellaneous material on the floor because they “didn’t use it.”
The Bottom Line: Clean-up time is still never my favorite part of my STEM class, but with this routine, it has become a tad less chaotic!