Teacher Organization Tips

Make things in your classroom run smoothly by being organized in the classroom. Taking the time to set up your classroom organization will pay off in the end for you in spending less time on tasks. Here are some ways to get you organized.

Teacher Organization

Purchase some manila file folders and a file folder rack. Label folders with the days of the week. You may want to label two folders with the same day so you will have two folders labeled Monday, two labels Tuesday and so on, for a total of 10 folders.

Now here is what you need to do. On Thursdays, do your lesson plans for the following week. Go in earlier in the morning to do this or stay late after school on Thursday. Once your plans are created, go through each day and make the copies you will need and gather the material needed for the week. This means even the read alouds you will be doing.

Once all the material is copied and gathered, place them in the appropriate folders. For example, if you are reading The Kissing Hand on Thursday, place the actual book in the Thursday folder. Once you do that, all your material is ready to go for the following week.

Don't spend your weeknights at home or weekends in the classroom or working on school stuff! It takes some extra time, but if you are organized, do it all on Thursday and your whole next week is ready to go! This was key for me when I was in the classroom.

Student Work

Create an area that you can keep student's work all in one place and easy to access. If you don't have a filing cabinet, purchase a crate and get some hanging folders.

Label each folder with a child's name. Stay on top of filing their papers so you don't get behind.

Having student work in one place is great because if a parent comes in and wants to see their child's work, it is right there to show them. If teachers are getting together to look at data, your student work will be easily accessible.

Again, taking the time to plan and organize will save you a ton of time in the long run.

Student Data

Keeping track of how the children in your class are doing on assessments is very important. Giving assessments on a regular basis produces a lot of paperwork. Make sure you are organizing it into one spot. I recommend creating a data binder.

Divide your binder into sections based on the assessments. Behind the tabs include your spreadsheets. Don't' include the actual assessment because that will fill the binder up too much. Place the actual assessments in the files you created for each student.

Having all your data available in one spot makes it easily accessible when you need to analyze how your students are doing.

Take the time to get all of your paperwork in order and it will help your year run much smoother.

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