3 Organizational Systems that will Save Your Time and Sanity | The Lettered Classroom

one of the biggest challenges in teaching is figuring out how to organize your activities games materials that you really start to accumulate over the years so in this video i'm going to be sharing three different ways to organize some activities that you might have in your classrooms and hopefully they will give you a little bit of inspiration and help minimize the stress of having to look for these materials but also have it in a nice neat little format hey everyone my name is bridget speckman i'm a multi-age teacher in central pennsylvania i teach fourth fifth and sixth grade learners across all content areas i have a passion for literacy instruction and i would love it if you would like subscribe and hit that notification bell so you can get notified every time i upload a new video so i'm really excited about this video because i have found these new ways of organizing some of my activities and materials i think one of the challenges that i have had over the last several years is figuring out a system that really works for me and works for how my brain kind of thinks and organizes things and so i've gone from lots of different methods over the years i've gone from having accumulation of binders inside of a closet where i would store things inside of these plastic you know page protector sleeves to having very large bucket containers where everything for that theme would go inside of that bucket to then having the scrapbooking buckets that you can get at michaels but the problem is is that with all of these different ways of organizing they tend to become a little cumbersome and also messy if you have been somebody who also has a file cabinet been there done that had a file cabinet and organizing activities inside of a file folder seems like a great idea because it's all kind of tucked away inside of the space but once you start to open up that file folder things are falling out everything's not organized you're having to kind of scrounge through and find all of the pieces to everything and that takes time it's frustrating and at the end of the day you're like well why don't i just go ahead and reprint and remake it instead of spending all this time looking for it i feel you i've been there i also have been that teacher that has tried every single storage containing solution that is out there and nothing ever seemed quite right last year i really started investing in the scrap booking containers that you can purchase from michael's and while i love these containers i love that they're clear i love that they stack very nicely the problem is is that they are pretty big and so again i'm placing a lot of different materials within it because i have all this space within this container and so you don't want to buy more containers you just want to be able to fill that space so i'm putting multiple activities within this container and it's just not working out because again it's going back to that file folder i'm having to search find the materials find all the pieces together and it's just really frustrating but recently with me working on unpacking anchor standards within my membership which i'm going to leave a link down below if you guys want to go and check that out i have been creating tons of different resources and activities and i started placing them inside of a binder with page protectors but again it was too cumbersome the binder was like stretching the page protectors wouldn't fit everything so i took to amazon to find new solutions and one of the solutions that i ended up finding is going to be this very lovely document container now i will tell you that out of the three different options that i'm going to be showing you in this video this is going to be the most expensive i think it was about nine dollars for each container but i love how simple how small they are in design and so one of the ways that i will end up using this is by storing all of these small group activities that i know i'm going to be using with my kids within that container and i do this by anchor standard so if i know that i'm looking for something to help me teach summarizing i can go to the summarizing container and in there is going to be all of the activities that go along with summarizing if i need something to help me teach a theme i can go into the theme container and do the same and that goes for every single anchor standard that i've been working on if you are guys are really interested in learning more about the unpacking anchor series that i have going on in my membership definitely check it out down in the description box um the membership currently is closed but we will be reopening soon so go ahead and put your name on the waiting list so that you guys can get notified now here's the other things that i love about this i love that they're fairly small i love how thin they are and they do stack really nicely and so compared to the comparing this to the michael's scrapbooking containers this doesn't take as much real estate as what i would like to call it uh in my closet and it's a lot easier for me to be able to kind of place all of the items plus when you look at it the items are not kind of all falling apart falling everywhere um instead where the michaels have these huge spaces in between some of the documents i feel like everything starts to shift a little oddly these containers keep everything nice and snug so i mentioned how i like to organize my activities and so i have kind of various types of activities that i will use inside of my classroom the first are going to be the resources that i use to either teach those specific anchor standards those learning targets um or something that i'm doing within small group and the other containers that i just showed you a second ago are perfect for that now for some of my activities i have them as more theme activities and i like to build different lessons around some of these themes because it's more engaging it's fun and sometimes when you just want to do a mystery activity you just need to have kind of all of those resources together and you spend a lot of time creating these things you spend time you know building uh the banners and creating the little cards all of it and laminating and cutting i don't want to have to redo that every single year especially if i know if that particular resource is a very good one to use in my classroom so one of the other items that i ended up purchasing and this can kind of be in the next two that i'm showing you guys it are these little zipper pouches so i think i've seen a lot of different teachers who have started talking about some of these i've also seen some fashion bloggers who've talked about these just with organizing and like caring and maintaining them i've used a version of these in the past but they were much smaller and i used them for when i was putting together little vip like packs like emergency packs for my chaperones this is going to be a letter size and so it has a very nice little zipper as you can see and it has kind of that mesh look here so you see that it has that ribbing so everything is nice and waterproof within this which is also a great feature of it and i can slide any activity inside of here and then be able to store it it's also something that's going to be very easily labeled so you can create a label place it on the bottom of that and you can have these all nicely stacked inside of your closet so that you can sort through them and that makes it really easy to just kind of pull out that specific zipper pouch and everything is going to be inside of it so you're not having to search through a large container to make sure that you have all the pieces you know you have all the pieces because it's kind of locked in this cute little package so these little mifflin zipper pouches were actually the cheapest out of all of the three different options that i'm showing you these here are came in 24 inside of a pack and i think it cost me like 16 or 17 dollars for the 24 pack so you can tell that you're going to be able to get a lot of use out of them they're not going to go dingy or nasty and it's going to keep everything really nicely organized the last one is probably one of my favorites i mean i like the containers the containers are a really big contender as well but i really really like these and i forgot that i actually used these a while back but these are gonna be your clear envelope plastic you know packages and with these uh they come with a little string wrap around so you can unwrap it like this and on the inside you can place all of the different materials what i like about it is that it is one that will expand so let's say i have a lot more materials like for instance like this activity here this is the journey through the genres activity that i posted into my membership for the month of july and with this i know that i have plenty of space to be able to put all of my materials if i go back to like the mifflin one this here doesn't have a ton of space it is what it is it's not going to get much wider and if it does it's going to get bulgy and it doesn't have any area to be able to stretch here at the bottom or at the top what i like about these is that they do expand there is room to grow inside of these so if i have a heftier activity like this one i don't have to worry about things fitting the other thing that i really like about this is that it's a legal size versus the mifflin zipper ones were only letter size and so i know for a fact that every single paper that i have even if i print like an anchor chart on a legal size paper it's definitely going to fit inside of this little package and i can do the same process i can label it have them stacked inside of my closet so that i can just sort through them and when i'm ready to do the activity i have everything in here i can pull it out keep it at my desk so that when i'm ready to put it all away i ensure that everything goes in the exact spot so the plastic envelopes came in 12 inside of a pack those ended up costing me about 15 so it was a little bit a dollar and some extra change and it was one that i think is the best solution for organizing some of those activities and games that you might have inside of your classroom now obviously there are so many different ways to be able to organize anything that you're using inside of your classroom but having a way to be able to organize the materials that you're using those paper materials is really really important i think it's just a whole nother level to have you know your manipulatives placed correctly everything like in those nice containers but thinking about how are you going to do the games the pages all of those extra pieces that you create those tend to be the ones that become overwhelming because they're laying out you're on your desk they're laying in a spot you haven't put them away yet and it's because you haven't found the perfect system yet so i encourage you to check out the three options that i've talked about today because they're the ones that i'm loving the most especially because i felt as though i've been there tried it all from the file cabinet to the large containers to the scrapbook containers and these seems to be the best option for creating like their individual spaces without everything seeming very overwhelming so i hope that you guys enjoyed this little video uh and chatting you through some of the options that are out there i know for a fact that i'm gonna be organizing like a maniac when it comes to all of these different resources and again if you guys haven't checked out already the membership definitely go and look at it this is gonna be a literacy membership for third through sixth grade where we offer you the unpacking anchor series where we unpack every single common core anchor that is out there providing you with resources text explanations for the expectations of those anchors along with monthly resources to help kind of guide you in teaching and engaging your students thank you guys so much for watching go ahead and give this video a thumbs up if you are new here i'd love for you to go ahead and subscribe and hit that notification bell so you can get notified every time i go live or i upload a new video thanks again guys see you very soon bye

Channel: The Lettered Classroom

Views: 10,117

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Keywords: teacher tips, The Lettered Classroom, classroom decor, first year teacher, classroom setup, classroom organization, a day in the life of a teacher, elementary teacher, middle school teacher, education, how to be a teacher, how to teach, new teacher, teacher youtuber, teacher vlog, weekly teacher vlog, classroom ideas, elementary teacher, classroom inspirations, teacher organization, upper elementary teacher, teacher life

Id: klHWv8Ly1Qk

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 05 2021