Inside My Cupboards

I spent the entire day cleaning and organizing my binders and resource books. I decided that I need to stop shopping on Amazing late at night.

All of my teaching materials are stored in binders. I like how binders allow me to see everything as I browse my resources. Files are just too messy for me, even when they're organized. (Read more about my file organization here.) I only use file drawers to store copies and information that I refer to frequently.

So here is my wonderful wall of storage!

Here is a peak inside the top cupboards. This one contains 2nd semester textbooks, and my socials studies and science resources (most of them are stored in a separate cupboard that is shared by the 2nd grade team).

Here are my math manipulatives:

Here are my math resources, and our reading curriculum, Storytown (which I don't really use). I LOVE how nicely the Ikea magazine holders work for categorizing my resource books.

ELA resources: I used to care about color-coding my binder spines, and making them look really nice, but that is one thing that I have let go of!

ELA manipulatives: It looks a little crazy here, but many of these things will be used right away at the beginning of the year, such as word work materials. I don't put them out ahead of time, because I want to get to know my students first. I have a lot of different materials, and different classes have different needs/interests from year to year.

The top shelf of this cupboard contains some guided reading materials, and books that I don't keep in the classroom library (most of them have flaps, or weird things that fold out and would get ruined easily). The next 2 shelves contain my guided reading materials, which I like to keep "hidden" for 2 reasons: 1) I have the space in my cupboards, and 2) It makes my room look less cluttered. Thankfully, my school has a great reading resource room full of books, so I don't have to store very many guided reading books in my classroom.

The bottom 2 shelves contain file folder games for small group learning, and extra school supplies.

This is where I store "household items," such as tissues, sandwich baggies, plates, etc. This cupboard will be FULL after open house!

I also have some great build-in drawers! Here are my extra accents, postcards, nametags, etc. (can you tell I've worked at a teacher store for 3 years?):

These drawers contain supplies for students:

The last few drawers contain my office supplies:

I have 5 really large drawers that are perfect for storing bulletin board sets. Here is the top drawer, which looks a bit messy! It contains pocket charts, sentence strips, and birthday stuff (they get to pick out a book for their birthday). Organized chaos:

My bottom cabinets have these great pull-out drawers (3 sets total...I won't show all of them). Here are the recess games:

Wow, that was a lot of pictures! Some people will probably thinking I'm weird for posting pictures of the inside of my cupboards, but I know that the crazy organization people, like myself, will enjoy them. :)

Time spent at school today: 8 hours
Cumulative hours: 118.5