Productive

I had a nice little productive afternoon in my classroom since my in-laws are visiting and they were able to stay at home with Baby Sneaker. I feel like I finally got some solid organizing done and I am very thankful because certain parts of my room have been a mess since I moved in. Now that I share, I have less space of my own, yet there is tons of storage space in the room and some cabinets are still empty even with two teachers sharing the room. 

My goals today were to

finish organizing my books-check!

organize my desk-check!

organize my file cabinet-check!

move my games and activities to the cabinet where I took my books from-check!

I'm really happy with how my little library came out. All the sections are labeled and I know I will have a much easier time finding books when I need them this year and will be much more prompt and timely in putting them back where they belong! I hope that my students don't think it's fun to pull the red dividers out. 

I also organized my curriculum materials and put them on this shelf that is next to my desk. I may put labeled card stock dividers in here to separate my subjects just like I did with my picture books. 

I remembered to take photos of my display boards this time because the borders are up now, but I think I need to redo them because I didn't staple them enough and there are gaps. Boo. I also need to trim the edges still. 

My phonics and reading walls look so plain, but I am definitely waiting until we have our Journeys training to put anything up on the reading wall and the phonics wall gets built up as we learn, so I don't start the year off with much on there. 

The last major project I want to complete before school starts is sorting the math pages from our student workbooks and homework books. We never use the workbooks the way we get them, so we have the bindings cut off and them sort them so we have a class set of each page. Usually I have parent helpers do this, but we had boxes sitting around for SO long last year because it took a long time and I want all this stuff organized and put away right off the bat this year. I am not sure exactly when I will get this accomplished, but I want to make an effort. This year, we will also be sorting our pages by math strand so we can easily access pages that relate to whatever strand we are working on. I don't really feel like I can have a parent sort the pages like that because I need to think about it myself, so all the more reason to do it before school starts. 

I definitely feel like I could have stayed in my room for several more hours, but I wanted to come home and play with my baby girl. Hopefully I can get in there a few more times before we are officially back. 

Do you like organizing your classroom or do you feel like it's a chore? 

I heart organizing!