Classroom Organization for the Disorganized

Believe it or not, it took me two years to achieve this state of organization!

Alternate title for this post: Slowly, Slowly Organized the Sloth.

I have a vision of what the perfect teacher was like as a student. She kept all of her papers neatly organized. She highlighted and took notes and never doodled in the margins. She actually used the free weekly planners the school distributed, and sometimes she supplemented with her own. Her life was a sea of blissful labels, where everything had its place.

I was not that kind of student--I did my work on time, but it was often slightly crumpled from getting stuffed into my bag. Organization is not my strong suit, and teaching early childhood comes with so much stuff. One million books, some leveled, some not; a hundred sets of manipulatives; countless educational games, some bought, some teacher-created; tons of art supplies; a huge amount of pencils that nevertheless vanish by April... I know that I am quite lucky to teach in a school with such great supplies. But the organizing! Sometimes I wish I could have started off with an empty classroom and gradually added the supplies I needed.

Without further adieu, here are a few classroom organization tips I've picked up along the way:

1. Purge your supplies at least twice a year. If it's June and you haven't touched that cool new gadget you had to buy for your classroom, you're not going to use it next year. Get rid of it. If you've accumulated dozens of mugs from students over the years, keep one or two of the most recent ones and get rid of the rest. How much coffee can you drink, anyway? (Don't answer that.) Sentimentality has no place in organization. Be merciless and you will have much less work to do.
2. Figure out what you should hoard and what you should use up. I stock up on glue sticks like nobody's business, but that's because there's a high turnover rate. Sometimes I blink and an entire glue stick has fallen to one of my more enthusiastic artists. On the other hand, my teaching predecessor left me with so much construction paper in the closet that most of it had actually thinned and faded with age by the time I got around to using it.
3. Label everything, even if it's nailed down. I have yet to experience much theft beyond the occasional pencil, but picture labels are an enormous help in the classroom. If you label the supply boxes and the shelves where the boxes belong, clean-up becomes about 500% easier. (Rough estimate.) Plus, labels help build literacy! Even if you're not teaching early childhood, label all your things. Trust me, you will be happier and better able to find things. Who has time in their teaching day to go on a quest for the stapler?
4. Consult the experts. Confronted with my terrible organizational skills, I spent a lot of time researching the best ways to organize a classroom. My Pinterest board bears the fruits of these labors. Special highlights include The Clutter-Free Classroom and Mrs. Terhune's First Grade Site. Plus, there is the famous I Heart Organizing, which will make you reconsider how you run your entire life!
5. Make yourself a "classroom closing" checklist. This is more small scale than the other tips, but it's helped me be more mindful at the end of the day when my energy and my brain are just gone. (Does anyone else putter around aimlessly for 20 minutes after school is out? Just me?) At the end of the day, I prep everything I will need for the next morning, rotate our daily schedule/literacy center schedule/etc., write the Morning Message on the board, give the tables a quick wipe down, and try--TRY--to clear off my desk. Accomplishing the latter often means shoving papers in a drawer, but that's my next disorganized habit to break...