A Place for Everything

With the thought of being out on maternity leave, I am more determined than ever to get organized this year!  I know that paper piles up so quickly the second students show up (and even before) so I'm starting with creating a spot for every paper.  I stuck with the paper items that show up with students...not curriculum materials. I made a little checklist to help myself.  Feel free to use it!  Click on the picture to grab the PDF.

I KNOW there are some missing (like Take to the Office) so there are blank spots too.

Remember that you may not need all of these. All mail for students goes directly into their mailboxes (or just tossed on top until we have a second).  I keep my weekly progress notes and homework together by the mailboxes.  I also cut down on lose paper by making packets for EVERYTHING I can.  All my math units are in packets so I never have lose math sheets in my room.  As I actually get my room together, I'll post pictures!

If you think of anything else...please let me know!

Organizing Student Data

Pregnancy and I are not friends.  If I'm not sick, I'm sleeping!  It makes it very hard to get ready for school, let alone blog about it!  I was motivated today to setup my Student Data Binder so I'm going to share with you exactly how I did it! 

It was pretty quick and easy once everything was printed.

This is my binder & cover (it has to have a cute cover right?!)

When you open the binder, you see the list of students with numbered tabs.  I laminated this page 4 or 5 years ago and just use wet erase markers to write the names each year. 

At this point, you will want to organize your students and assign them each a number.  I organize my kids alphabetically by grade level (since I have 3). 

The first page I keep under each tab is the At a Glance sheet.  This one isn't filled in for confidentiality but you get the idea.  It has basic information about the IEP so I don't have to flip through a 20 page document every time I have a quick question.  This does take a little while to complete BUT I do it when I'm reading the IEP before school.  Plus taking notes helps me remember the important information.  IEPs start to all blend together after a while! 

Next, I put my progress monitoring sheet.  I assess goals monthly and I typically have 1 reading, 1 writing, and 1 math goal.  I just write the goal in at the top and as I assess, I record scores and notes.  I have several versions of this in my teacher binder kit.  I hand wrote this one but I typically type the goals in before printing. To save time, just copy and paste the goal from the At a Glance sheet! 

Next, I put the IEP.

Then, I have my parent contact log. 

Finally, I have lined paper.  This is good for extra notes and documenting behavior.  Some kids need more notes than others.  Rather than trying to figure out how many pages everyone would need in a notebook, I just use the lined notebook paper.

There is plenty of room in the binder to also keep behavior plans and anything else that comes up during the year.

All of these forms and the binder cover (plus a ton of other forms and binder materials, including a sub binder-245 pages) are in my Colorful Dots Teaching Binders for $4.