- You've got all of your
centers ready to go, but they're not organized. You're looking at this pile of
centers and you're wondering how will I ever keep up with all of this? In today's video, I'm gonna
share with you some tips and strategies on keeping
your centers organized. Stay tuned. (soft music) Welcome back educational rockstars, I'm Farrah, from Farrah Henley Education, where I strive to bring you
actionable tips, strategies and simple systems to take
back into your classroom, to make your teacher life a little easier, and today we are gonna be talking about organizing your centers. Now if you are new here,
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the social media platforms or you can send it to
them through an email or a direct message. Now, organizing your
Math and Literacy Centers is something that I think every teacher needs to have in place before
the school year begins. But if you're getting started with Math and Literacy Centers, or you've decided that here in mid year, you need to get these
under control right now, this is very simple to do. It is not going to take
you that much time. It's very easy to do, very simple to do, and you can have your
Math and Literacy Centers pretty much organized in a weekend if you just sit down and get it done. The first thing you need
to be thinking about is how you're going to keep all the pieces of a specific center together. Now, we know and if you have
been around here very long you know I am all about
keeping it stinking simple. You could go and buy elaborate
cases and elaborate things to keep your Math and Literacy centers in. But I am all about the Ziploc bag, yes. Now I'm gonna go ahead and grab one because this Ziploc bag right here, I love to grab just gallon
Ziploc bags, just like this one and you'll see, this has got a
center cover in it right now. But I love gallon Ziploc
bags and here's why. Number one, they're cheap, and some of you may be saying, "Oh my gosh Ziploc bags are not cheap," but if you have a hint for
where you can get these at a pretty decent price. But the other thing I like about them is they're so super
simple for kids to use. Kids know how to use a Ziploc,
even my kindergartners, and yes, as you go through the year, these are what are in the student's hands. So this is what the student is actually going to be pulling their center out of and using during centers. And so these can get ripped and they're putting things back in them and they can get ripped. But they're super simple
and easy for the kids, if you set up some sort of station or set up a box of these somewhere where the kids can go grab another one and they can replace them
very simply and very easily, and it takes that duty off of your plate. So my tip for getting these
super, super reasonable is to grab them at your local
restaurant supply store. Now, yes you could purchase
them off of Amazon in bulk but definitely buy them in bulk. But my favorite place to get them is restaurant supply stores. Because they seem to have
the best price per unit on these when I buy large boxes, and some of you may be thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm not going
to need 500 of these." Believe it or not, you might. And so I definitely recommend
go ahead and buy them because you can use them at home, you can use them in your classroom, there's other things you can use them for. You're never going to have
too many of these Ziploc bags. So with these Ziploc bags,
not only are you going to be keeping the actual center in them, but you are going to be keeping all of the center pieces in it. For example, here is a center and this is for my Math
and Literacy bundles. I believe this one is for first grade, this is one of the first grade centers. But this particular center and inside this you're going to keep the
cover for the center. If you're using my center, you're gonna keep the cover of the center, and then you're gonna keep all of your pieces inside this as well. So these little cards are gonna go in here and all the pieces to the
center are gonna go in here. But then there's another size bag that I'm going to recommend
that you get as well. I'm going to recommend that you pick up some court
size bags also and here's why. Now these aren't too small, but some centers are going to have pieces that are maybe smaller than this. So these little center cards, these little cards that they match are not really that small, and so typically I might just throw these in the center, in the big bag. But some centers have small pieces, So you're gonna want
maybe some court size bags for you to keep some of
these smaller pieces in and so I don't have one with me right now, but the court size bag and then put any smaller pieces
inside the court size bag, and then that bag goes inside the big bag. So that's just another tip. All right. So the next tip I wanna share with you is all this stuff that is in this bag. You want it to last now while the bag, maybe something that you
can replace very easily and even the smaller bag, and if you set a station
up for your students to go grab another bag and
replace it quickly and easily. You are gonna wanna make sure that the actual center lasts for a while because you are putting your hard work into creating the center. You've spent money printing
either on colored paper or printing in color and
you want that to last. So my next tip is laminate all the things. Laminate, laminate, laminate, laminate and I'm gonna go one step further and say if at all possible, do not use the laminating
that your school provides. I know teachers already spend
so much out of their pocket, but I'm gonna tell you that this is going to save your sanity and your
sanity is worth so much. I don't know about you, but I will spend some money
if it's gonna save my sanity. So what I suggest you do is I suggest that you purchase five
mil laminating sheets. Yes, I said five mil. They're gonna be hard,
they're going to be sturdy and they're going to be thick. Now, my laminating
machine that I purchased was just a personal laminating machine and it was a Scotch brand. It's in the drawer behind me. So I'd probably I, but I
think it's a Scotch brand and I got it off in
Amazon for about 30 bucks. Well, let me rephrase it, I didn't actually purchase,
the first one I purchased, the second one was a parent gift. When I got asked, I was like "I kinda need a new laminating machine." But the laminating sheets themselves if you can find an office supply one of the bigger office
supplies or paper goods supplier. Oftentimes you can get
those laminating sheets for very, very, very cheap. And just like the Ziploc bags, you're gonna need a lot of them. So make sure you just
purchase as many as you can and as many as you can afford, but if you are not able
to purchase in bulk and in big bulk all at once, then oftentimes I could
find them at Sam's or Costco and they were very reasonably priced for a large box of about 250. You can also find really great deals on Amazon when they go on sale, and so they're comparable if not cheaper to what you can get at Costco or Sam's. Another reason I love
laminating is because, the kids can use dry erase
markers to mark on them and then they easily wipe off. So if you get the three mil, once they've wiped off a couple of times, you start to see a film or a coloring coming on your lamination, and yes they can be cleaned, but then you're putting
spray on them to clean them, and so sometimes it can seep
between the the laminating film and it just starts to degrade
the quality of the lamination. By using the 5 mil, you're gonna get a lot longer wear out of it and they're gonna clean easier and you're gonna get a
lot longer use out of them when you're cleaning them. And especially right now with COVID and having to do all the
sanitizing in our classrooms. I had a teacher in my membership that just did the three
mill for her first round, and by the end of the
first month of center, she was like, "I'm gonna
have to remake them all because I've had to sanitize so much that the three mil
lamination didn't hold up." And so the second month
she found the five mil, she did them in five mil and she was like, "Oh, by the end of the month, they still looked like
they were brand new." So she was super excited
to go to the five mil. So that is definitely
something that I recommend. My next tip for how to
organize your Center, is those Iris boxes. Now I know we've all seen them. We've seen them have hobby lobby, we've seen them at Michael's, we've seen them online, on Amazon. My best tip ever is these Iris boxes. Now the Iris boxes that I recommend and pay no attention to the
things I have written on here. I use this for so many
demonstration purposes are the 12 by 12 and I
don't know if you can kind of see it's messing with my screen, but the 12 by 12 Iris box and I use the one that is about, I would say that's about two and a half, probably three inches. It's probably a three inch thick. Now I use these for storing my centers for the entire month okay? Now, for example if I was
to open this right now and you can kind of see
in there a little bit, I wanna hold it up. You'll see all of those sheets in there. All of those bags in there are for one single month's
worth of centers, okay? Now, so there's a whole bunch of these. I have found that I typically can get about 30 of these bags
inside one of those boxes, and that's with pieces,
with centerpieces in them. So I can get about 30 bags inside there, with the center pieces. I love those boxes and
here's why I love them. They last forever, they
literally last forever. I had a set of 24, I had 12 for my Literacy centers
and 12 for my Math centers, one for every month of the year, and you wouldn't even have
to do one for every month if you don't wanna do if you're not here around school and you just wanna do it for the months that you're in school. But I had 12 for Literacy, 12 for Math and I had those and I had
them for about five years, and when I left the classroom, I gifted all of my classroom things to an incoming brand new teacher, and she still has them and
she's still using them, and that was four, three
years ago, four years ago, I can't remember now, it's
been so long, so long. So they last forever, they clean easily. You can write on them and that's what you're
seeing there on the lid. I'm actually writing the
supplies that were inside, that were needed for centers and stuff 'cause I also use these
for the actual center that the student is going to be using, and when I use them
for that, I can just... I'm gonna put whatever
center they're working on for that particular center that day, and then inside the box, I
can also keep any supplies, any manipulatives or anything like that, that they're gonna need
for that specific center. And this is gonna cut down on disruptions and it's gonna cut down
on them having to get up and go get things that they might need, I just put them all in the box. But when you're organizing your centers and you're getting things ready so that things are quick to switch out and you can get to things easily when you're switching your centers out. I had 12 for Literacy, 12 for Math and then I labeled each one of
them with a label like this, so I'm gonna go and show you. These are my center organization labels for the 12 by 12 Iris boxes, and let me jump over here
so I can scroll through them and you can see that I had, they would just say February, January, February, March, April, May, June Math centers and so forth. But also inside this download you'll get the pieces for the ends. And the reason I love this is because not only would I put the main
tag up on the top of the box, but then I got to find
there the front of the box. So on the front of the box I would put the small tag right here so that when I had them
stacked up on a shelf, then I could see easily
which box I needed to grab. I'm gonna leave a link to this so that you can jump over
and you can check those out and you can grab those. That made it super, super simple when I would switch out my centers. I could just go grab
the box that I needed. I could switch the centers out and then I would just put all the centers from the center itself,
I would just grab it, put it back into the monthly box, grab a new one and put
it in the center box. So the next tip that
I wanna share with you is assign center jobs. Now I've talked about this before with regard to running your centers, but I'm talking about a center
job of switching them out. So for example, make it somebody's job, make it a classroom helper's
job to switch your centers out. So when it's time at the end of the week, they go around, they grab
all the center boxes, they bring them to a central location like your teacher table. They open them up, they
take all of the bags out and then that gives you empty boxes, and if you already have the bags ready to go into the centers, like you already know which centers are gonna go or replace them, you can have those ready to go to where they can even
put them in for you, and then they simply leave the centers someplace where you can put them up. Now, depending on what
age your students are, your students might be
able to actually go ahead and reorganize and sort those 'cause trust me we always
have that one student who's like super organized
and they love office supplies. So they're like a teacher at heart, they're little bit mini me and they can find the boxes that you need to put the centers back into, and so that's something
that you might think about. Because it's just gonna take
one more thing off your plate. So make sure that you
are using your students wherever possible to take
things off of your plate. My next tip is get digital. There is no better way to be organized and not have stuff everywhere
than to go digital. There's a reason that so many teachers are trying to go paperless and digital centers are
a great way to do that because at that point
you're organizing files. That's what you're organizing. Now a lot of teachers still like that hands-on tactile learning that you get with center pieces and
actual printable centers and that's great. But take some work off your plate and maybe do half and half. Maybe do printable centers
and digital centers or if you are virtually teaching, you can still do centers by
using this digital centers, and you can keep those organized just by organizing your files, and it's so easy to find
and search for files. I wish a lot of times I could
just walk up to my shelves and I could look up and I could just, like there was some sort of system where I could just type in a standard and it would just like light up the box that I needed to pull center out of, and I think I need to invent
something like that right? I think that would be super, super cool. But going with digital
centers is going to give you a little bit more
control over organization because again, you're
just organizing files and they're super fun for your students. In fact in the description, you can click the link
to get a free sample of my digital centers. There is going to be a Math and Literacy for K, first, second, third and fourth grade teachers
for you to grab those, and you can try those digital centers out with your students if you're
not already using digital. Now, if you're looking
for more tips, strategies and simple systems to take
back into your classroom, to make your teacher life easier, check out the videos on our screen. Thanks for watching and keep
being an educational rockstar.
