Happy New Year from The Elementary Entourage!

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you are enjoying your last few days of relaxation before winter break ends.  I'm loving seeing all of the goals and resolutions from all of my blogging friends, so here at the Elementary Entourage we wanted to share some ideas with you to help you with your goals! 

 Here is what we have in store :)

  We will be sharing our ideas each day for the first 2 1/2 weeks of January and we would LOVE it if you'd link up too.

I'm up first so today I'd love to share my tip for organization with you. 

For real, I get so excited to organize things, it's like a weird addiction for me.

Here are some tips that I use in my classroom to help things run more smoothly:

 Organizing all those fantastic teaching resources is always a struggle.  I used to store all of my teaching materials in hanging files in my classroom.  

This was an okay system until I needed to plan. How many people have time to actually get their plans done while in their classroom? I know that I was never able to get everything done at school so I'd end up taking a folder of two home with me to finish my plans.  This always turned into a paper crinkling, falling out, hanging files stabbing me, and getting lost disaster!  So I finally decided one summer to put everything in binders, and let me tell you that this changed my teaching planning life!

Just look at how nice they look sitting there on the shelf *sigh* Okay so here is what I did. First I sorted everything by theme/unit that I teach.  Then within the binder I sorted into categories for reading, writing, math, and fun.  Most items are hole punched but some I put in page protectors for safe keeping.  I also started binders for each subject as well for non thematic materials.  Now that I have them all at home I want to sort through them even more, but thats my OCD.  Here are the covers for my binders if you are interested in binderizing your teaching files!

My next tip is for organizing your classroom library. If you are like me you have a problem with buying ridiculous amounts of children's books and are constantly reorganizing your classroom library.  I usually end up with bins that get too full and either have to change to a larger basket or subdivide the category.  I saved myself some time by creating labels that can be numbered and renumbered easily.  I also use velcro to attach the labels to my baskets so they are easy to remove and attach to different baskets. Here is a quick overview of my system and my labels.

I have the same labels available in black or chevron as well. Hopefully you can use some of these tips to help with your organizational goals.

Don't forget to check out the great tips our team will be sharing as well as link up to share your own! Here are the rules;

1. Please link to a blog post, not a TPT store.
2. Please link back to the Elementary Entourage blog in your post.
3. Show some love to the others linked up by visiting their blog and leaving a comment or 2.

An InLinkz Link-up