CCP: Episode 23 // Mastering Classroom Organization
Calling all organization lovers!
Our instruction is only as effective as how organized we are. In order to have a smooth sailing school year, we first need to set the foundation of organization in our classrooms. This includes taking inventory on the supplies and resources that we already have, restocking on those things we need, and then organizing it all in a way that allows us to be the best teachers we can be!
In this week’s episode we are talking about all things classroom organization. You’ll learn some actionable tips for getting organized from top to bottom so that you can start your school year off right!
Highlights from the Episode
Why it’s so important to get organized BEFORE the school year starts (3:03)
Taking inventory on what you already have in your classroom (4:05)
take inventory on individual student supplies
take inventory on shared classroom supplies
take inventory on craft supplies
take inventory on teacher supplies
take inventory on math manipulatives
take inventory on books in your classroom library
Organizing Student Data (8:27)
Creating a system to organize teacher resources (lesson plans, long-range plan..etc..) (9:15)
Creating a system to organize weekly materials (student hand-outs, manipulatives) (10:02)
Getting organized with your games, center materials, math manipulatives, etc… (10:35)
Organizing books in your classroom library (12:57)
Getting your digital files organized and in order (13:51)
Resources and Links Mentioned in the Episode:
Get cheap printing (and your first month FREE) with the HP Instant Ink Program
Tools, Apps, & Websites for creating a digital data base for your classroom library book titles:
How to Set Up a Student Data Binder (+ FREE data binder starter kit)
Take the Digital Detox to Get Your Digital Teaching Files in Order
REVIEW & SUBSCRIBE TO THE CLASSROOM COMMUTE PODCAST
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Transcript
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Hey teachers, if you have a classroom and a commute, you're in the right place. I'm your host, Rachael. And I want to ride along with you each week on your ride into school. This podcast is the place for busy teachers who want actionable tips, simple strategies, and just want to enjoy their job more. Let's go.
Before we jump into the show, I want to let you in on a little secret. In fact, it's the best kept teachers secret that I've come across in a long time -- and I want everyone to know about it. For years, I would drive to my local print shop to have classroom decorations and resources that I created printed off in color. Now, only did this cost me a lot of money, fifty-six cents a page, to be exact - But it was such a hassle and a waste of time to drive all the way over to the print shop, often on a weekly basis, and wait for my order to be complete.
That's why I was thrilled when I came across the HP Instant Ink Program. HP Instant Ink is the perfect membership for teachers who do a lot of printing in black and white, or even color, and they want to be able to do so for only a few dollars each month using an Instant Ink approved printer - I got mine for under a hundred bucks. You can print your classroom resources right at home for as little as $2.99 a month. They have several plans to choose from to meet your printing needs. And the best part -- Instant Ink keeps track of your printing ink levels and will ship you new ink before you run out so that you never go low on ink in the middle of a project. This program has been a lifesaver for me and has saved me so much time and money, so I couldn't keep it a secret any longer. Right now you can get a free month of Instant Ink to get started. Just go to classroomnook.com/instantink to get all the details. Happy printing.
Well, hello there. Welcome to The Classroom Commute Podcast. I'm Rachael your host, and I'm so excited that you're joining me today because we are in our second week of the Getting Your Year in Gear Teachers Summer Challenge. This is a challenge designed to help teachers intentionally plan out their school year from classroom design to curriculum mapping to building classroom community and so much more. And if you're just tuning in for the first time, definitely go back and check out episodes 21 and 22 of this podcast where we laid the groundwork for the challenge. Once you've got those two episodes under your belt, come on back to episode 23, which is where you are right now.
And today we're going to talk about inventory and organization of your classroom. And if you are an organization nerd like me, you are going to love this episode. I think it is super important to make sure that you get yourself organized before the school year starts, because you know as well as I do that once the school year starts, it becomes harder and harder to keep your focus on organizing, as your focus then turns to lessons and activities and projects that you're doing with your students. So take the time during the summer, if you can, to set that foundation to be organized and to make sure that you've taken inventory on all the things that you have in your classroom and stock up on those things that you need before the school year starts.
And again, I'm going to encourage you to sign up for the Getting Your Year in Gear teacher summer challenge, because when we talk about taking inventory of your classroom and getting it organized for the new year, we have a resource with a master checklist and shopping list that will help you get your classroom up and running with the supplies that you need.
All right, let's dive in. I've got five steps that I'm going to share with you to help you get organized for the new year. Before you can get organized, you have to know what you have to organize in the first place, right? So the first step is to take inventory on what you already have in your classroom. I used to hate it when I would be out at a store shopping for something for my classroom and I would buy it and then come back to my classroom, only to find that I already had ten of them. So we want to avoid that and make sure that we know what we already have.
Here are some things that you want to take inventory of: You want to take inventory of what student supplies you already have on hand in your classroom. And of course, these things are going to vary depending on the age group that you teach. But just as a general guideline, I'm talking about things like pencils, pens, rulers, pocket folders, spiral notebooks, pencil sharpeners, crayons, markers, colored pencils, glue sticks, scissors, binders, calculators, composition notebooks -- you get the idea, the things that students are going to be using on an individual basis. Maybe they keep them at their desks or in their lockers or cubbies, if you have those. Make a note of the quantity of each thing that you have and make a note of how many you need in order to start the new school year. And maybe these are things that your school provides for you, but if you were like me, I would provide these for my students, so I needed to know how many I had and how many I needed to get for the upcoming school year.
Then you want to take inventory on the shared supplies that you use in your classroom. Things like those personal whiteboards, dry erase markers that your students share, loose-leaf paper, construction paper, tissue boxes, and hand sanitizer. And again, this is going to vary depending on your grade level, but these are some things that most teachers have on hand for their students to share in their classroom. Make a list of those things. List what you have and what you need.
Another thing to take inventory on are your student craft supplies -- things like yarn, paint, buttons, feathers, glitter (if you're brave), felt, pom poms, beads, pipe cleaners, all those things that you may need and use for student projects. Make sure you have what you need on hand and you create a shopping list for those things that you still need to get after you've taken inventory on student supplies.
Make sure you check your teacher supplies -- things like your staplers and staples, stapler remover, Sharpies, your favorite flare pens, highlighters -- all those things that you may be keep at your teacher desk. What are you running low on? What do you need to get more of? What do you have too many of so that you make sure that you don't get too much of one supply. Teacher supplies might also include cleaning supplies that you'd like to have on hand like disinfectant wipes and sprays that you like to have in your classroom to use for your own personal classroom.
And then, of course, by the end of the school year, you know how crazy and disorganized your math manipulatives and tools get. So it's important that you take inventory on what you have, what's gone missing, and what you need to replace. We're talking about those base 10 blocks, dice, color tiles, geometric shapes, snap cubes -- all those little pieces that easily find their way into the dusty corner of your room. Make sure you know what you've got and what you need.
And finally, you need to take inventory on your classroom library. This is probably going to be the most time consuming, especially if you've been teaching for a while and you've really developed a large classroom library. But it's important to keep track of the titles that you have so that you can make sure that your classroom library stays relevant and current. There are even a lot of apps on your phone or online tools that you can purchase to help you keep a digital database of your books. And I will link to some of those in the show notes. Some of these apps allow you to scan the bar codes of the book that you have and it will record it for you in your database. So that makes it really easy for you to know exactly what books you have on hand.
All right -- the first step is to take inventory on your teacher and student supplies as well as your math, manipulatives and the books in your classroom library. Once you've taken inventory, now you can create your shopping list or put in your school orders for those items that you need to purchase so that you can restock your supplies for the new school year.
Once that's completed, now we can get organizing some of the other things in our classroom. Things like your student data. It's become more and more important to have documentation of student learning and their progress and their learning, as well as a communication log between families at home. So creating a student data binder for each of your students is a great way to keep all of these documentation pieces in one place. And I actually have a resource, a blog post, rather, on the website that you can check out that lets you know exactly what goes into a student data binder.
And you can download a free data binder starter kit to help you organize all of your student data. I will link to that blog post in the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/23.
Aside from organizing your student data, you also need to find a system that works for you to organize your teaching materials -- things like long-range unit plans and lessons that you want to be able to refer to year after year. Lots of teachers use a binder system for this and they put each unit in a separate binder, or each topic and skill in a binder. And then each year they have that same binder to pull out off the shelf and refer to over and over.
You may choose to have a digital organization of all your files if you don't have the space in your classroom, and that works fine as well. We're going to talk in just a minute about organizing your digital files, but come up with a system that is simple, that you are going to be able to maintain for organizing all of your teacher lesson plans and long-range units.
You also need to develop a system for organizing your weekly materials so that you know on Monday, these are the handouts that I need, on Tuesday, these are the manipulatively that I'm going to need for each lesson. So whether that's using a filing cabinet or some sort of desk system where you have file folders in an organizer on your desk, make sure that you have a system that you can use over and over. And again inside the Getting Your Year in Gear Teacher Summer Challenge we give you lots of tips and ideas for how to do this, as well as some visuals to help you think about what it might look like in your own classroom.
So by now we have our student data organize, we know how we're gonna organize our long-range units and our lesson plans and our weekly materials. Now we need to think about how we're going to organize all of our games, our student materials, our center activities and our books.
We all have that junk drawer, so to speak, in our classroom where we just throw all of the dice and the playing chips and all those things that don't really have a great spot. Well, hopefully this summer you will finally be motivated to get all of those things in your classroom "junk drawer" organized once and for all.
Here are just a few of the ideas that we share inside the teacher summer challenge to help organize all those little pieces: Over-the-door hanging shoe caddies make great storage compartments for all those little game pieces and playing cards that may easily find themselves out of place. They also are great for storing things like headphones for your listening center or even small art supplies -- things like paint brushes or markers and crayons.
One thing that used to drive me crazy in my own classroom is when boxes for games or puzzles would get bent out of shape and destroyed. So a solution for that, as well as a huge space saver, is to store games and puzzle pieces in those pencil zipper pouches, and then you can store all the zipper pouches in some sort of basket. You'll really save on some space.
If you have a lot of file folder games. Consider storing all of those in a three ring binder. You can take your file folder and three hole punch down the side of them so that they will slip in a three ring binder. Then, you can organize them by skill or content, area or subject. If you have small pieces or game cards that go along with the file folder game, use a page protector, one of those plastic page protectors, and slide them inside of there and store it right after the file folder in the three ring binder.
If you have access to a lot of baby wipes containers, if you have a young one at home or you know somebody that does, you can re-purpose those plastic containers that the baby wipe refills go into for game or center storage in your classroom. And they stack really nicely as well to make it easy to store away. So there's lots of hacks for storing things out of sight and keeping things organized. And we discuss even more inside the Getting Your Year in Gear Teacher Challenge.
And lastly, on the topic of organizing your classroom supplies, let's talk about your classroom library. There are a variety of ways to organize your books. Of course, some of the most popular ways are by DRA guided reading level, Lexiles, etc.. But to be honest, I think a lot of teachers have actually moved away from that and are now organizing their books more according to author or genre or themes and topics. And that might be a more well-rounded way of presenting the books to your students. And then inside each of those baskets, you can have a color coding system where students know their color that correlates with a reading level that's going to be best appropriate for them. That way, students aren't bound to just one level basket. They can still explore all the authors, all the genres, and all the different themes and topics and not feel like they are shunned to one specific basket for their level.
All right. The last thing that I want to talk about as it relates to organizing is making sure that you get your digital files organized before the school year starts. Make this year your year to finally get them organized.
I talked about going through a digital detox a few episodes back. And I will link to that episode in the show notes. And it guides you through a simple three-step process to get your digital files organized so that you no longer look at the sea of files saved on your desktop. I will link to that podcast in the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/23.
All right. That brings us to the end of our time together. Let's run right down through all of the things that you need to consider when it comes to taking inventory and organizing your classroom for the school year. Step one, you're going to take inventory on all your student supplies, your students shared supplies, craft supplies, teacher materials, math manipulatives, and the books that you have in your classroom library. Taking inventory will allow you to know what you have in your classroom so that you can prepare your shopping lists and your school orders for the new school year and restock and be ready for when your students come.
The second step to organizing for the new school year is to think about how you want to organize your student data. And I linked to a free resource in the show notes that will give you a free student data template that you can print out and use with your classroom.
The third step is to come up with a system for how to organize your teaching materials. These include your long-range unit plans or your lesson plans, as well as your weekly materials that you're going to use and need easy access to.
The fourth step is to develop a system for organizing your classroom supplies and resources. These include coming up with a way to organize your classroom games and your student materials and the center resources that you use, as well as a great system for organizing your classroom library.
And finally, make that commitment to yourself to finally get your digital files in order and organized on your computer so that you no longer have to spend hours finding that one file that you know you saved somewhere, but just don't know where. So take the digital detox. I will link to that episode in the show notes so that you can finally get organized on your computer.
Well, there you have it. Your five steps for how to take inventory and get organized for the next school year. If you are looking for the fast pass on how to get this done, make sure that you sign up for the Getting Your Year in Gear teacher summer challenge, hosted by myself and my good friend Mary Beth from Brain Waves Instruction. It gives you all the resources, all the tips, and so many great ideas for how to get planned and prepared for a new school year. You can find out how to sign up for the challenge at classroomnook.com/yearingear. And that's all one word 'yearingear'.
And of course, everything that I talked about specifically related to inventory and organization that we discussed in this episode can be found at the show notes at classroomnook.com/podcast/23.
I hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your day and I will see you back here again next week for another episode all on preparing and getting ready for a new school year. Bye for now.
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