Why Wednesday: Organization

I am a day late again but I am here to link up with Blog Hoppin’ for their Back to School Teacher Linky. Today’s theme is organization!

Eesh! I LOVE being organized and one of my favorite stores in the whole world is The Container Store! HEAVEN. Plus I am a Virgo (we are stereotypically well organized) But do I actually have time to be super organized? No! Especially during the school year. I need all the help I can get. This summer I brought home about 12 boxes of stuff to organize into binders and envelopes for language arts centers and math (Like A Teeny Tiny Teacher did earlier in the summer). Did I do it yet? NO. School is in 2 weeks!

So basically I have my own activities for language arts either in these types of binders or envelopes. Activities that I run off go in the binders but reading centers hopefully each get an envelope. My favorite place to buy the binders is Wal-Mart and the envelopes are at Target for about a dollar a pop.

Here is an example of a center already in an envelope and labeled nicely. My goal is to get more envelopes with clear labels and maybe even labeled with what box they are in – or I could assign each box a number and put the number on the envelope to make it easy peasy to return the items to the right box.

Here are a couple examples but from Amazon. The prices of both are actually very similar. The folders are about $1.10 each and the binders are just about the same prices as at Wal-Mart, if not cheaper. Click on either image to get more info at Amazon.

What I want to do this summer is get these envelopes in these plastic boxes in a more organized way. And efficient. For example, the Christmas centers take up more than one box so that is not working out too well. I haven’t quite decided how to do it. Should I separate the centers that are holiday-themed or keep them in with the other activity and sort by topic (for example have a box of short vowel centers). I may just have to survey what I have first. If you have a suggestion, let me know!

Here’s a full box with some nice and some jacked-up labels. Need to fix!

My other major organization strategy last year was making this tool kit (Here is my post about it from last year). I bought the tool box from Home Depot and spray painted it white. Then I got the labels from Kristen Doyle on TPT here. Clearly I need to make some labels for a couple of drawers for this year.