The Great Wall of Guitars:  Organization Tips and Tricks

I’m not sure if it was the teacher before me or someone even further down the line who earned the grant to buy a class set of guitars.  Whoever it was ordered 25 full-size acoustic guitars and 5 “3/4 size” acoustic guitars for our class.  That teacher also must have ordered 30 “string swings,” to mount on the wall so that guitars could be easily accessible to students.  I love that the guitars are so accessible.  I hate that one whole wall of my room is dominated by the guitars and cannot be used for a word wall, other instrument storage, bulletin boards, or anything else.  Can’t put a kid in “time out” near the guitars.  Heck, you can’t even have them sit too close to that wall or else you’ll soon hear some strumming or hear the “whack” of a guitar being pushed against the wall.  Sigh.  The only solution I could think of for K-5 kids being to close to the guitars was putting down the colorful carpet squares as a “do not cross” boundary.  If they are on the colorful carpets then they are too close to the guitars.  Not perfect, but works most of the time.

My first step in organizing these awesome guitars was to figure out how to number or order the guitars so that students could find the same instrument every time.  I didn’t want students wandering over and taking tons of time picking out their “favorite” guitar, wasting the first five minutes of class every day.  I wanted to be able to assign a guitar to each student so that they would use it every time.  A couple reasons for this.  With limited 3/4 size guitars I wanted those to be available for the kids who really needed it.  Assigning all guitars meant that I could choose who got which guitars and why.  It also meant that if something went wrong with a guitar (tuning was way off, something broken, etc.) I could narrow it down quickly to the person who used that guitar.

The teacher before me had decided to name each guitar with a unique name so that kids could find their guitar every time.  I loved the idea but decided to tweak it just a little.  The names that she gave guitars were names like “Zeus” and “Ophelia” and “Buddy.”  She had started out with the organization scheme of naming one guitar after every letter of the alphabet:  “Annie,” “Buddy,” “Connor,” etc.   There was one guitar for every letter of the alphabet and then some.  She had to double some letters since there were more guitars than letters of the alphabet.

Naming the Guitars after famous Guitarists

I decided to keep the tradition of naming the guitars but I wanted to rename them after famous guitarists.  I did a little research and came up with the names of 30 great guitar players and did my best to include men, women, and people of color.  I wanted this to be as inclusive as possible and still show off some really famous guitarists!  My plan is to eventually have students write an essay about the famous musician that their guitar is named after.  By that point, they’ll be used to seeing the name every day and will get a chance to learn more about why that guitarists is really great!  You can see the names of some of the guitars if you click on the images below to enlarge.

A couple little tricks to the backing images.  I divided the guitars into two group of 8 and two groups of 7.  That meant that the 30 guitars were divided into 4 mostly even groups.  I then gave each of those groups a color (orange, green, blue, or grey…  to match my classroom decor colors!).  This means that I can say “if your’ve got one of the blue guitars you can walk over and get your materials/guitar off the wall.  I also included a number for each guitar on the label (there’s also a number on the back of the guitar head next to the tuning peg) so that kids can also match their guitar to the spot on the wall.  You can see this correlation if you look at the picture of “Jack White” above.  The numbers definitely help as well so that I can say “If you’ve got a guitar between 1-8 you can go get your materials.”  

The last thing to do was add something above the guitars.  The “string swings” were mounted on the wall long before I started working at this school and they are placed so that the guitars don’t hit one another, are spaced evenly, and are still accessible to students.  However, there was one high-flying tack strip right above all the guitars and I couldn’t figure out what to put up there.  It wasn’t big enough for work wall stuff (and was really too high). I thought about putting composer pictures up there or maybe instruments and their families.

I eventually decided that the obvious thing was to put up pictures of guitar chords to make the wall an “all guitar” space!  I whipped up these easy guitar chords to match the rest of the room and bam, I was done!  I tried to include all of the major chords that we ad middle schoolers could realistically play.  I didn’t include anything too difficult or too out of the scope of our limited playing.  I made the posters so that all A/Am chords were blue, all B/Bm chords were green, all C/Cm chords were yellow and so on.  That was it was easy for them to see the difference between chords and figure out where one “family” of chords ended and a new family began.  ​

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I’m still learning what things my middle schoolers can do with guitar and what they’re actually able to play.  One class of guitar students is truly struggling and having a hard time putting their fingers on the fretboard, making chords sounds right, and manage both right and left hand at once.  The other guitar class is about four weeks ahead of the first class (even though they started at the same time) and can play multiple chords, work through songs, switch back and forth between chords, and is asking for harder material.

I’m also working on resources and trying to create new things as I work through how to teach the course.  I’m trying to figure out what really does help in this guitar class situation and what things might be beneficial to other teachers.  I’ve added the guitar chord charts along with a guitar chord “cheat sheet,” and some other resources.  Check them out here.  

If you have any other suggestions or ideas for resources, let me know!  I’d love to create something that makes teaching guitar easier for you and for me!  I’ve started a “Teaching — Guitar” pin board on pinterest and would love to make it collaborative.  If you have great guitar ideas, pins, or want to pin to this guitar board let me know and I’ll make you a contributor (email me at MakeMomentsMatter@gmail.com and I can add you to the pinboard).  Leave a comment below or shoot me an email with ideas!