Get Organized: Two Weeks Planned and Ready to Go
Last week I shared several organization ideas that I use to help me stay organized and, in turn, less stressed, 30 Years of Teaching: How Being More Organized Helped Lower My Stress. In that post, I briefly mentioned “Catch-All Drawers”. Today, I’d like to share a bit more with you about the catch-all drawers I created and how having those drawers have helped me keep my sanity when it comes to being organized.
The school year in my district is divided into 2 semesters. Each of those semesters is divided into quarters (9 week periods). With this schedule in mind, I set up two file cabinet drawers with hanging folders. The top catch-all drawer contains the first semester and the bottom catch-all drawer contains the second semester. First, I placed 18 hanging folders in each drawer. One for each week in the semester.
Next, I labeled each hanging folder “One”, Two”, etc. Inside each hanging folder, I placed two file folders. The file folders correspond with the week on the hanging folder; so one folder is labeled “Math – Week 1” and the other “Science – Week 1”. I continued with the file folders until all hanging folders have two file folders inside.
Once the drawers are set up, it is just a matter of placing a single hard copy of the activities I use in the appropriate folder after I use the material with my students. While you may not see much benefit from implementing this system the first year, you certainly will in the years after.
To make the materials more readily available when I need them, I began to lable my lesson plans with the week of school year.
Many times, I will include a sticky note on a particular resource which serves as a reminder of how I used the resource in the past, what worked, what didn’t work, any prep work I made need to do prior to the day of the lesson.
For me a good Catch-all drawer is truly invaluable. It makes planning my weekly lessons much easier. I also like that I can refer to my previous year’s lesson plans to quickly locate which week’s file a resource is stored in. In fact, this system of storing materials each year has worked so well, I have begun setting my electronic resources using the very same system.
Math Resources from Week 26 (pictured above):
I hope you got an idea or two from this post! Thank you so much for stopping by. I hope you return next week when I demonstrate how I use Calculate and Clean Math to diagnose student errors and intervene to get them back on track.
