At the beginning of last year, I moved into a classroom that had seen many teachers come and go. It was apparent to me that no one had really called this classroom home, as there was a mish-mash of stuff everywhere. Being a pretty neat and tidy person, I set to work on decluttering and getting rid of old materials before the school year began. As I started to go, I realized what a huge project I was beginning. I found health curriculum from the 1970's, writing resources from the 1980's, and worksheets that were blue and smeared from an old ditto machine.
During the first month of school, I stayed late a couple nights to organize the filing cabinet, just to do an initial purge. I bought metal frames and hanging file folders to organize everything into. I separated the materials into drawers of math, language arts, science/social studies/art/health, and the last drawer for behavior management and monthly files.
Then as I went through the year, I realized that I was not using the files that were already in the cabinet because I wasn't really sure what was in there. And I was adding a lot of resources that I made and bought from TpT. I decided to organize it all by standard.
Here is the math drawer:
Each standard gets a file folder. I put the standard number on the tab and the standard itself on the front of the folder. Inside each folder are my I Can statements (I use the ones from
Surfin Through Second), worksheets, and centers that correlate with each standard. I keep all my centers in plastic page protectors and label them like Katie from
Teacher to the Core does. When I saw her post, I thought it was genius!
Now when I go to teach a specific standard, I just pull the folder and choose which materials I want to use. I think it will really help me this year with planning. It also helps me see which standards I don't have a lot of materials for and need to stock up on at TpT!
How do you organize your files?
