Decluttering

I went back to my classroom this morning with the girls to tackle the mess on the tables. 

 I had huge piles of stuff to sort through and put away in the cabinets.

Little Sneaker once again had tons of fun exploring the classroom and playing with everything. I think we were there 3 hours this morning and got home just in time for her nap. She is currently zonked out in her bed and I am hoping she has a good long nap. 

I spent time trying to sort and organize things and put them in places that makes sense. I still have quite a few piles that need attention, but I feel good about what I accomplished. 

I organized the shelves that are close to my desk. I have my reading materials on the left side and then math, science, and assessment materials on the right side. You can see my nice, colorful binders all lined up on the shelf. :-)

I am not going to send literacy bags home this year because I had many parents sign up last year and then request to not receive them anymore. I think for families that have younger siblings, there are way too many small pieces included in the games and it was difficult to keep track of everything. I also often had kids tell me they never even opened the bag once they got it home and once again many things went missing. The biggest difficulty was doing inventory on the bags every single week to check for missing items and then trying to track down said missing items until they were returned. That was really time consuming. I am hoping to deconstruct the bags and use the books and activities in a different way instead of sending them home. For now, this is their home until I figure out what exactly I am going to do with them. 

I put all of my games on the bottom shelf. Those activities will most likely be used during play time, choice time, or small group time if I have parent helpers. 

This cabinet houses my science materials on the bottom two shelves and my math materials on the rest of the shelves. I decided to keep unifix cubes, my tile games, and my pattern blocks on shelves that the kiddos can access because when too much stuff is hidden away in the cabinets I forget that I have it. Since I am planning to do a daily play time this year, even if it's a short one, those materials will probably be used a lot more frequently than they have been in the past. 

I forgot to take a photo of those shelves, but they are the shelves that separate my carpet area from my desk area. I really hope it's not a problem to have those materials on the shelves that the kids sit near while they are on the carpet. I guess I can always cover the shelves with curtains if the materials are distracting.

It's crazy that I've already put in about 7 hours of time working in my room and I don't feel anywhere near done. I still need to create my bulletin boards, hang my alphabet wall, finish cleaning up and organizing etc. There is so much to do! I am really glad that it's working out to take the girls with me because it gives me a LOT of extra time to work. If I waited until school started to do all of this, I would never get finished!