After teaching nine years in the upper elementary grades, I am now embarking on a new journey to teach 2nd grade in a different building and feeling as if it were my very first day as a teacher. In setting up my new classroom, I began to have those same overwhelming feelings I had that very first year. I am trying to find new ways to organize my time and materials.
As August quickly approaches, many teachers enter their classrooms with many thoughts and questions. How should the room look? Should I put posters here or there? And the always challenging question - how should I set up the desks for that first day welcome. I spend at least 30 minutes just working on that part of my classroom. New and veteran teachers all find the first thoughts of the new school year to be a little overwhelming.
It truly does not matter if you have taught for 15 years or just one year, every teacher wants to make the classroom inviting and organized. Teachers want to have everything streamlined and accessible. Most of us spend countless hours browsing the local stores looking for great storage ideas that will maximize the work space and create a more flowing environment. I struggle each year with organizing my files, my daily teaching needs and the student’s materials, and I am always looking for innovative ways to make my daily work more effective. I have found large crates to be useful for storing teaching materials, and I label them so the students know the books are for teacher use only. I use smaller crates to sort out the student library books into genres and authors. Now that our district has gone to using accelerated reading, I have labeled each of my books with the AR level and point values which help the students locate the correct book for independent reading time.
I went online and found many helpful websites addressing teacher organization. Most of the tips addressed organization as a management tool, which makes a lot of sense. If you are organized, then you are better able to manage the classroom and the job of educating your students. Several of the websites mentioned using numbers for students rather than labeling with specific names. I have used this organization tip for several years and have found it to be successful. In a school with 60% turnover, it made more sense then tearing off labels each time a student moved away. The numbering system comes in very handy when collecting homework or notes. I simply put them in numerical order and can quickly see who is missing a paper. The students learn their numbers and those of their classmates very quickly and can sort weekly folders and such easily for you.
My next organization task will be to arrange specific lessons with all of the resources and lesson activities in one place to maximize my planning time. A colleague has some of her favorite lessons structured this way to include the lesson plans, standards that will be taught, lesson activities, expectations, and assessment tools. She has all of the needed materials in one flex folder and it all fits neatly into her filing cabinet. It takes a while to get it all organized, but she feels more efficient during her planning time. Since I am beginning a new grade level I feel like a new teacher, and I believe it will be much easier to organize the units and lessons as I plan for this year, therefore, making my second year in this grade level much easier. Luckily, I have many friends that teach 2nd grade that can pass along good lessons and advice.
For all of those truly new teachers, just know that even veteran teachers experience the anxiety of organizing a classroom. It is important for all teachers to use each other for resources. Why reinvent the wheel when perhaps a veteran teacher has great organization and can give you some tips for your new classroom. On the flip side, veteran teachers need to recognize that new teachers will have some inventive ideas to bring to the table as well, and we all need to put on those good listening ears to learn from each other. As for the organization frenzy, I will continue to work on that one each year and hopefully find a system that works with my teaching style. Perhaps there is a person out there that can do a classroom makeover and make organization suggestions that maximize the learning and teaching space for all classrooms.
