Hi guys!
As you may have seen on Instagram this week, I have been hard at work setting up my classroom. Things are finally starting to come together, and I am feeling like I will be pretty much ready for la rentrée by Wednesday, when my new kiddos will arrive!
I have been sharing pieces of my prep in my Instagram stories. I have gotten a lot of questions and comments about my new bathroom “passes”, so I thought I would share them with you guys today.
I found this idea on Pinterest when I was looking for bathroom pass ideas. I don’t like giving real passes that my students have to take with them into the bathroom (ew haha), and they are not required at my school.
Also, we are most often not working at our desks, so I don’t find that the kind of pass where your students leave something at their desks to show that they are gone works well for us, either.
The general rule of thumb is that one student can go to the boys’ bathroom and one to the girls’ bathroom at a time (to reduce the potential for “bathroom play time” haha).
Most of the time, my students have to ask permission to go, so that I can make sure that someone isn’t already out of the room. But sometimes, like when I am working with a small group, I just don’t want to be interrupted for bathroom requests every 10 seconds!
In the past, I just added a picture of a toilet to our centre board (yes, true story haha – don’t judge me), and students would move their picture to the toilet picture while they were gone and replace it when they got back. It worked okay, except that often students would forget to replace their picture, so other students would be waiting a long time for no real reason.
During my Pinterest research, I found a much more fun way to have my students let me know they are at the washroom – push lights!!
I bought two push lights from Amazon (affiliate link – the white ones I got are discontinued, but these black ones seem to be the same!) and drew one of each washroom symbol on them using a regular black Sharpie marker.
I hung them up by the door using hook and loop fasteners (aka Velcro) (I bought the strips from Amazon, too – affiliate link).
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| Ignore the words – I forgot to save the picture before I wrote my Instastory explanation! |
When my students need the washroom, they will just click on the light with the symbol that matches the washroom they will be using. When they come back, they will turn it off.
I think that turning the light on and off will be fun/cool/exciting enough that they will be pretty likely to remember to actually do it!
Now I am just hoping they will also remember to wash their hands before they come back ;)
Bonne rentrée!
Affiliate links for products I used to make the bathroom passes:
– Velcro strips (I use these for hanging up my visual schedule, too!)
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