The Classroom Rug: The Constant

Over my time both as a teacher and a student, I’ve often shared my preference for nonfiction. I hated reading until high school when my 11th grade teacher gave my class the opportunity to read the first page from a handful of books and choose one that we’d like to read in small groups. I chose a book that started with the lines, “Mother died today, or maybe yesterday, I can’t be sure.” This book, The Stranger by Albert Camus, led me to start reading more books on existentialism and eventually led me to major in philosophy as an undergraduate.

But despite my love for nonfiction, which still dominates my preferences today, there’s been one fictional series that I’ve loved even more. Lost. Throughout the series, I was attracted to the attention to detail not of just one character, but of so many, that the audience got to know so deeply. Despite its topics of scientific research, the paranormal and time travel (my least favorite), I couldn’t focus on anything aside from the social behaviors of a group of (unknowingly intertwined) strangers. The episode most well revered from Lost is called the Constant.

The Constant focuses on time travel as a character’s consciousness is trapped jumping in time between the past and the present. In order to return his mind to its normal state, the character needs to find a constant, a person to connect both his past and present. The constant is an anchor, something ever present that acts as a foundation and a grounding. With the help of the constant, Desmond regains his footing in a scene that’s not to be missed.

So how does all of this relate to education? As you start to create your classroom environment for students, both the physical and the structural elements, it’s important to think of what ways you can ground your students in the space. Consistency and routine are integral to creating a safe space for children, and safety is ultimately important for children to take risks in their learning and socializing. How can we ground children in a classroom? What will be their constant?

MORNING MEETING AND CLOSING CIRCLE

Over the years, our classroom rug space has served countless purposes, all of which were aided by the consistency of the rug space itself. The first few minutes of a classroom schedule may vary depending on the building-wide structures and protocols, but all classrooms benefit from a morning meeting. During this meeting, students learn about any upcoming events of the day, review the daily schedule, and get to know one another. The rug space serves as the home-base for students to start (and end) their days together. This time itself is a form of a constant. Whatever happens, whatever we learn or don’t learn, whatever successes or challenges we have, we know that every day will start and end in a familiar spot. At the rug, I often suggest at least two options for students to situate themselves, either in lines/scatter spots for learning, and in circle spots for the option to share and socialize with one another.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

A regular morning meeting and closing circle at the classroom rug creates a perfect opportunity for community building. Whether you follow a Responsive Classroom model that suggests an activity for each meeting, or whether you build in your own games and energizers within your daily schedule, community building in a neutral space is beneficial for all students. Caring for class pets and plants, interviewing community members, playing games, dancing, singing, these all provide opportunities for students to get to know one another and their school community. Utilizing circle spots and a space that feels safe and familiar, students may feel more likely to participate and share with their peers.

WHOLE GROUP LESSONS

Depending on your class size and academic levels, you may or may not find yourself in whole group lessons throughout your school day. Whether this lesson includes all of your students or a smaller portion, utilizing the rug for lessons provides another opportunity for students to take risk in a space that feels safe. The larger, open space of the rug is especially powerful during math lessons, where graphs, charts, timelines, and manipulatives can be utilized in large-scale for more student engagement and participation. Especially in younger grades, bringing math into more real-life, concrete contexts is important, and the rug provides space for this type of teaching. The balance of this is ensuring that all students have visual access to the information you’re sharing, whether on the adjacent board or in the center of the circle. Utilizing a variety of seating options, such as benches, rocking chairs and even standing spots, can help facilitate whole group lessons at the rug where all students can see and participate.

CENTERS AND SMALL GROUPS

The large physical space of the rug provides an excellent opportunity for choice time or integrated study centers that also require more space, in addition to small learning groups. Although block centers should be designated to their own space that can remain preserved throughout a child’s building time, the rug space is often used for hollow blocks and dramatic play, due to the nature of these centers requiring gross physical movement. Our rug space has been transformed into oceans, restaurants, schools, car washes, marshes and more all thanks to the vastness of the open rug space that isn’t provided in any other spaces of the classroom.

INFORMATION SHARING

I started teaching as a substitute in Syracuse, NY in 2009. I’d just changed careers from working in television production and had meaningful, but brief, work with children prior. After many years as an educator, I’ve thought a lot about the most important skills and qualities of a teacher, which I often boil down to one important thing; taking big ideas and making them easy to understand. This happens daily as we explain why a th no longer makes two sounds, but instead changes to make the th sound. We do it when we show regrouping ten ones into the tens place to form a ten and the number 10. But we also use this important skill when when we talk about equity and the idea that everyone should get what they need, and that we all need different things. We simplify large, complex systems, such as the reason why we had a noticeable earthquake in NYC, or why the air outside was too hazy to see through as wildfire smoke moved south from Canada.

The classroom rug provides a safe space when sharing information can seem hard. It was at the classroom rug where I first shared news of my second pregnancy and maternity leave plans with my students, and also at the rug when they met my new daughter months later. It was at the classroom rug when we shared that students were very sick or needed an operation at the hospital, or when our classroom co-teacher became engaged and would be married. The classroom rug provided comfort when students began hearing rumblings of a world-wide pandemic creeping its way to the United States, and it was at the classroom rug where I recently shared with students that I would be working in a new school in September.

Schools around the world unexpectedly closed in March 2020, and my school learned remotely until January 2021. When we returned to our space, there were restrictions in place to make the best effort towards safety, including 6 feet of distance between students at all times. We created systems for students to have choice time, independently utilizing materials for a week at a time and sanitizing them before each weekend. We utilized slideshows to simultaneously teach our in-person and remote students, and we created individual material cases for each child’s pencils, scissors and erasers. But the one thing that was missing was a community space for us to gather. With six feet between us at all times, utilizing our constant, the classroom rug, was impossible.

As we returned from our COVID learning at home and transitioned back into the classroom, we did our best to minimize any possibility of spreading any germs, including not having a physical rug that was more difficult to keep clean. During my first four years of teaching in Brooklyn, we never had an actual rug. I want to stress that it’s not as important that this meeting space be outfitted with top of the line textiles. In fact, it’s best to be kept rather simple, offering a variety of seating options while keeping the focus on learning and community building. What’s most important is that the “rug” space remains consistent and reliable.

Being a teacher requires you to face the unknown every day. Your best laid plans are foiled as students casually share that they threw up in the car on the way to school today or that they heard about a war happening somewhere in the world. The classroom rug provides a consistent and safe space for students as well as teachers. At the rug, we know the expectations. At the rug, we are safe and cared for. At the rug we can take risks, build relationships with others and grow.