August is just hours away so don’t forget that we have the Beginning the Year and Starting the Year categories with stuff about that. One thing to add is, in my view, it is not a good thing to have a seating chart from the first day.
I wait and check things out. I go alphabetical for a few weeks to learn their names, and then, as each gift/kid gets unwrapped and I find out who is there to stink for the grade and who is there to simply play, then I make the seating chart based on that.
The absolute most important thing that I do by far is to take my four most offensive little grammarians* and put them as far from each other as possible in each corner of myclassroom. Dong this has worked wonders. Unless you want the little grammarians right in front of you, absording away the fun, trying to get you to teach so that they can be the best ones, move them.
Have access to the fun kids who normally sit outside the “T” formed by the front and middle rows which research says is where the higher grades are earned, in easy view of the teacher.
The most mojorific kids in TPRS classrooms are often the oness sitting in the back or the sides with tattoos and stuff like that. Reward them. We are one of the few disciplines that have the capacity to bust the cycle of ignorance that rewards the best grades to the best robots.
*I define a little grammarian as a kid who memorized their way through middle school and is in shock and awe after the first few classes, when their entire worlds are turned upside down by the approach we take in teaching using comprehensible input.