Rotation Scheduling that Works!

I love the way we've found to be running "rotations" (some people call them "specials") in second grade.  Some years we've had different ways of doing it, but this one has been the best, by far!

I'm sure you've heard of/done something similar, but if not--here's our process:
There are four teachers.  We look at the calendar and divide up the school year into four chunks of time.  We each pick a rotation subject that we'd like to teach for the duration of the first time chunk.  I taught art, and the other three teachers chose between music, P.E., and computers.  Each 1/4 of the school year we switch rotation subjects, so by the end of the year we have taught them all.  (By the way...if you're in Washington--or...pretty much anyplace else--and have an actual teacher/specialist to teach those subjects, count yourself LUCKY!)

We divide the 100 kids into 3 groups and name them by colors (red, yellow, blue groups).  On Monday-Thursday we rotate the 3 groups of kids through the 4 classes--changing them daily.  You'll notice there's a teacher daily who has no group--so we each have a plan period once a week of 45 minutes!

So for instance, Monday might be Red Group in PE, Yellow Group in Music, Blue Group in Art, and no one in Computers.  The computer teacher has a prep period.  Tuesday the groups move: Red Group to Music, Yellow Group to Art, Blue Group to Computers, and no on in P.E.--so the P.E. teacher has the prep period that day.  And so on.  It's lovely!

Here's a picture of my chart to show kids where they're going and who will be their teacher that day.  (It's the old version, when we only did 3 rotations and 4th teacher was called the "floater".  Her job was to teach PE on Monday to relieve that teacher for a day, then Music on Tuesday, Computers on Wednesday, then the floater had Thursdays off.  We did art weekly as a grade.)