Here are some ideas for organizing and storing teaching materials.
I prefer to store my teaching materials in a storage building I have at home. I take what I need to school for the month and then take it back home. I prefer not to mix things I’ve purchased myself in with things that belong to the school.
Every year I go through my teaching stuff in storage to weed out things I don’t use, or organize a few things that got misplaced during the year.
Having taught Pre-K for 12 years, I have a lot of teaching materials!
Books:
I have my books organized mostly by themes. The book boxes came from Lakeshore, and the books are sorted by topic into those. I put them in 2.5 gallon ziplock bags to prevent them from getting dusty. My book boxes are: (Top Row) Colors/Beginning of School, Families, Pets, Winter/Polar Animals, Forest Animals, Farm; (2nd Row from Top) Christmas, Fairy Tales, Transportation, Community Helpers, Plants/Pond Animals, Ocean; (3rd Row from Top) Dinosaurs, Safari Animals, Rainforest Animals, Bugs, Halloween/Pumpkins, Holidays (Thanksgiving/Valentines/St. Patrick’s); (Bottom Row) Misc., Misc., ABC, Science, Math, Music.
Month Boxes:
These are boxes I carry in to school each month (along with the books). These contain little manipulatives and games that I’ve printed and laminated, some have leftover craft supplies. For example, my April box has bug stuff, so there are printable games, some little plastic bugs I use for counters, real bugs in frames or acrylic blocks, real cocoons I found in the yard, some Insect Lore stuff, things like that. I used to organize things by theme, but decided to change to months, and I like this better. That way, I can toss in a game for teaching shapes, or an alphabet game that I want to use that month. Things in the month boxes don’t have to go with a theme. It’s just whatever I want to use that month. Sometimes I have an activity that never got used the whole year because I forgot about it, so I toss it in one of the boxes, and then it doesn’t get forgotten. The boxes are clear plastic file boxes from an office supply store. I bought these because you can always find this same type of box, same size, same shape, and I like consistency. I didn’t write on the boxes, I slipped white cardstock in the front, and wrote the months on the cardstock, along with the theme I chose for that month. I can change those easily if I decide to change my themes.
Big Books & Bulletin Board Sets:
This is a pocket chart stand with some nice storage bags I got from Lakeshore. These bags are great, but you could probably do the same thing with the extra large ziplock bags (they didn’t have those when I bought these). I use these bags to organize big books and bulletin board sets.
These are some extra things I brought home because I’m changing jobs this year. I love those boxes with the pull-out drawers, because you don’t have to stack and unstack boxes to get to what you want. You can also see I have some pocket chart sets hanging from a belt rack on the wall and the long blue thing hanging is bulletin board border storage. In what other profession do people buy so much with their own pocket money?
