Digging Into Next Year: Classroom Organization

Hi Friends! I’m so excited to be joining 50 other amazing bloggers to bring you a summer blog series in which we reflect on the past year, and share what worked, what didn’t work, and what we’re changing up! 
organize my classroom!
Classroom organization is so important in any classroom! Whether you teach kinders or seniors…having an organized classroom can save you valuable instructional time, and can even help eliminate potential behavior issues. 
Like most teachers, I love the way some things in my classroom work…things I’ve been doing for a few years, and have only gotten better each year. Perhaps, because I feel more comfortable with how it’s working. We use community supplies in my classroom – students only keep their notebooks, textbooks, and folders in their desks. Everything else is located in a place that can be easily accessed by everyone, which brings me to the pictures below.
There are 6 teams/groups of desks, and each desk has 3-drawer storage, and a “team tub” that sits on top of the drawers. These sit at the ends of each group of desks. These house pencils, glue, crayons, markers, rulers, clipboards, white boards, dry erase markers/erasers, scissors, and other odds and ends that we might be using regularly during a given season/unit/9 weeks.
Here’s a look at what’s inside…
The top drawer houses rulers, scissors, glue sticks, dry erase markers and erasers. I purchased some inexpensive containers from Dollar Tree to keep the items, well, contained. HA! Exactly four of each item are in this drawer, which is enough for each person in the group to have one.
 The second drawer is home to crayons and markers. Again, Dollar Tree containers are wonderful!
 The bottom drawer houses clipboards and whiteboards.
I use these bad boys to keep refill items, and items we don’t use as often. Actually, now that I think about it, some of these drawers work really well like the post-its, colored pencils, and glue sticks, but others were really just more of me shoving something in the drawer to get it “put away.” I’ll be revamping these some, because the base 10 blocks should actually be with the rest of the math manipulatives and base 10 blocks, and the dry eraser markers are something I need to have front and center all the time.
I feel like teaching is a science experiment…you know, changing variables to see what the results are. If I change this, how will that affect that? Anyway, the organization that needs the most help in my classroom, relates to ME! I’m great at keeping my students organized, but when it comes to my things, I tend to just set it on my desk, or shove it here or there, and it results in me spending extra time before or after school searching for “that book I know I have.”
I’ve enlisted the help of my grandpa to make a bookshelf that will fit perfectly under my smart board that will be used to organize my read-alouds. I got Multi-Purpose Bins from The Container Store, and will be organizing my read alouds by topic and/or unit. 
In addition to actually getting my read alouds organized rather than just on a bookshelf haphazardly, I want everything (team tubs, drawers, cubbies, etc..) to be labeled. Fortunately, I have my students well-trained and they know exactly what goes where, but I think labels would make the “training process” much faster.
I will be using these labels to help label my team containers, as well as anything else that could use a cute label! There are two versions of the labels – one with a chalkboard background, and one with a white background, plus both backgrounds have a blank page so that you can add any labels that might not be included! 
    
The labels above are part of my Chevron Brights classroom decor collection. All items can be purchased individually, or can be purchased in a bundled format for savings!
The bundle includes 15 products that amount to over 600 pages! Included in the bundle are these products:
Classroom Labels (seen above)
Year Cards – FREEBIE! FREEBIE!
Be sure to check out the other fabulous bloggers for even more really fantastic ideas! You can head over to Laura’s blog, Where the Magic Happens, to check out everyone’s posts!
Be sure to stop by each week this summer for some great ideas, tips, products, and maybe a freebie or two 🙂 Plus, we end the summer with an AH-MAZING giveaway!
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