Why Wednesday

I'm linking up with Blog Hoppin' once again! Today's topic is about being organized and WHY it works.

I would like to think that I am very organized . . . possibly bordering on OCD. One of my summer projects was called Operation Organize which pertained to going through tons of resources that I have acquired since starting kindergarten. Here are three of my best tips.

Jump Drives
I actually have three drives which range from 8G to 16G. One holds all of my stuff from when I taught Second grade, the other holds all of TPT documents that I have bought, and the last one is what I call my daily jump drive, which holds lesson plans and any documents I might need each week. I have numerous folders, and am known to keep documents in multiple folders based on the skill, theme, or multiple documents that are a part of a series such as monthly writing centers. Keeping my jump drives organized means I know where I can find any document I might need and I'm not wasting time searching. If I ever lost (or washed) one of my jump drives I would devastated. This last May, God must have been watching over me because I did wash my daily jump drive, but thankfully after a bag of rice it still worked! Thank you God!!!!

Centers
In Kindergarten all of my centers are standards based, but they tend to have a monthly theme. So, I organize centers by the month. Each month has one or two 12x12 storage containers where I may store any important books for that theme and all of the centers that I already have printed, laminated, and ready to go. This saves me tons of time digging around for centers. As you can see, I do dig through each box . . .

Letter Boxes
This was a part of Operation Organize. After two years in Kindergarten, I realized that while I had my letter stuff organized nicely, I was getting one thing from over here and another thing over there. I was spending 15 to 25 minutes each week pulling out and putting away the different resources from all of the locations around the room. While it may not seem like I lot, I knew there had to be an easier way - Letter Boxes! I purchased a bunch of photo boxes from Michaels this summer. Next I sorted through the variety of letter resources. I mod podged two to three letters on the front of each box based on the order it is taught in our district. Once they were dry I placed all of the resources that pertained to those letters inside. So next week when we start with the letter M, I can pull out the first box, and within two minutes everything will be ready. Plus everything for the next week as well when we move on to A and S.