How I Am Preparing My Students For STAAR - A Simple Room Transformation Idea | STAARbucks Mode | Starbucks Mode

Gifted and Talented Education & Upper Elementary Reading and Writing Activities

Have you heard of Starbucks Mode? It’s a simple, low prep, room transformation you can do at any time throughout the school year! Basically, you project or share a slide with directions or a to-do list, play calm music, and let the student work quietly. They can use this time to catch up on unfinished work, do enrichment projects, or anything else you can think of! It’s also a great classroom management strategy for when you want to pull small groups.

I couldn’t sleep one night, and naturally I started thinking about school and test prep. I was trying to figure out how to make it as fun and engaging as possible. Then, it popped into my head – STAARbucks Mode! A fun little play on words, and I think my kids will really love it. I threw together a simple directions slide with some cute Starbucks clip art.

This is the directions slide that I project on the board, or share during my Google Meet, during STAARbucks Mode.

The next part of this simple STAARbucks Mode transformation was to put together a list of topics differentiated for each student based on the topics they still needed to work on. Things like inferencing, summary, and main idea were on almost everyone’s list. To keep it on-theme I decided to call each student’s list their “STAARbucks Menu”. Here’s what they look like:

Lastly, I put together a bunch of task cards and activities that aligned with the topics on the student’s menus. I put task cards in their own ziplock bags and labeled them with the topic, and I made sure any other worksheets and activities were clearly labeled. Then, I laid everything out so that students could use their menu to choose the activities they wanted (and needed) to do.

During this independent work time, I pulled students one-on-one to work on specific skills that they needed support with. If you have a bigger class, you can pull small groups rather than one-on-ones! I also made sure to play calming coffee shop music quietly in the background, and we even dimmed the lights a bit for a cozier vibe.

And that was it! A simple room transformation that required minimal prep. A fun and engaging way to get students working. A classroom management strategy so that I can work with students individually. Could it get any better than this??

Leave me a comment down below telling me how you use Starbucks Mode in your classroom, or if you plan on using STAARbucks Mode to help your kids prep for STAAR!