Thursday, June 16, 2016

Teacher Organization

Hello, incredibly interested reader!

My organization for lesson resources and assessments has changed drastically throughout the year.  I highly suggest figuring out your organization style before entering your classroom.  Don't be a fool like me - spending hours re-doing things each year because you've changed your mind.  I know that it will still continue to be tweaked and fine tuned as we continue through our careers, but putting serious thought and consideration at the start could save you time in the future.

Here's my journey.

First Try 

-Google Drive for EVERYTHING-
This is great to use when you're separating items you've purchased or downloaded by subject area, but can't do much more than that, in my opinion.  The issue is that many times you'll purchase bundles or materials that cover more than one standard and you won't be able to label them by standard.  Also, you'll often find yourself trying to find a specific page within a file and wondering "Which PDF was that in?"  It's definitely not fast or easy to make copies from either.  You'll have to find it, print it, and then copy it each time.


Second Try 

-Binders by subject area-

This sounds like a good idea, in theory.  I ran into trouble because some areas (like ELA) will naturally have a ton of pages - way too many for even a 3" binder!  That makes it incredibly difficult to turn to the page you need and find it efficiently.  I was grabbing any free binder from the teacher's lounge to try to separate things.  I even used page dividers to separate the pages out into domains within the different subject areas, but it still wasn't working.  I needed a new method...

*Side note - you can hang cute binder clips using small command hooks and picture hanging wire.  They're great to keep handy and are also helpful to hang stacks of bucket slips (you'll hear about those in a later post).*



Third Try 

-Binders by content standard domains-

After spending ludicrous amounts of money buying binders on Amazon, I finally had what I needed to properly organize everything!  It wouldn't have cost so much if I wasn't so picky.  It took me months to find the ones I wanted and returning a set of binders that were incorrectly marketed online before finding these.  They're heavy duty, the rings are on the back not the center spine (then you don't have to center the pages before closing), and they have a one touch easy-open tab.  Trust me when I tell you to get one touch tabs.  I use my binders daily and it's saved quite a bit of hassle.

My babies!  They're the single best decision I've made for myself in my classroom so far.  It's very easy to find my materials now and I have page dividers inside of each one breaking it up into standards as well as page marker tabs sticking out of the top of certain pages to make them easy to find (spelling test, word wall worksheets, etc.).  When I purchase things on Teachers Pay Teachers or find them online, I print them off, write their content standard reference number in the top right corner with a pink pen, hole punch it, and immediately sort it into the right section.  It's an absolute life-saver for my classroom.

I hope you picked up a few tips!  How do you organize your lesson materials and assessments?  Leave your response in the comments below.

Until next time,
Ms. Frisch

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