Random Seating Arrangements

This post comes courtesy of a teacher on my team, Lauren! I wanted to share her awesome random seating arrangement idea, so she wrote this post for me! Thanks Lauren!

This is the process for my Starburst seating activity. It also works for randomly breaking students into partners, groups, etc. The idea is that as the students are walking into class, they randomly pick a Starburst out of the bin. You want to make sure the Starbursts are face down so there is no peeking! I use it to seat my students on the first day of school.

The first thing I do is number all of the seats in my classroom.

Next I look at how many students I have in each class period. Then I count out that amount of Starbursts for each hour and label each Starburst with a number.

*Note: When using a Sharpie to write the numbers on the Starbursts it will dry the Sharpie out because the surface is so slick. So make sure you have a piece of paper or a few Post-It's handy to get the marker going again after writing on a few Starbursts.
As I'm labeling the Starbursts I am sure to keep them separated by class period so that I know I have just the right amount of Starbursts for each class.

Next I put each group of Starbursts in a small ziploc bag and label them so they do not get mixed up.

Then I simply pull out the bag for that hour, dump the pre-numbered Starbursts in, and get big smiles at the door for a warm welcome to my class!

Thanks Lauren! I love this idea!

As for me, I hand my kids a popsicle stick featuring a science vocabulary word that they will learn this year. The popsicle stick matches a word that's taped to the corner of my tables. As the kiddos come in, they find their new seat and learn a new vocabulary word at the same time! This is also how I randomly call on kiddos throughout the year! :)