One Back Room Down!

As I continue to work through my classroom, I'm taking advantage of strange times.  Like 2-hour delays.  Even though I technically had a delay too, I came in about an hour and a half earlier than necessary to get some organizing time.  Here is the insane amount of winter weather that caused the delay:

The snowflakes did get a bit larger for about 3 minutes.  This is part of the view out my classroom window.  That's our local community center next door.

Anyway, in my before pictures, you got a glimpse of my back rooms.  I am blessed with a TON of storage, but I also share.  The other room is science storage for the school (not even going there yet).  In this room, I have the shelves and cabinets underneath them.  Well.  I would, if I could clean them out.  Still working on that.  It's hard to throw away other peoples' hard work.  Most of the filing cabinets in these pictures belong to the school office manager (who has very little storage), and I have been cleaning out the remnants of about 15 years of past teachers since my mentor retired.  Sloooow work, I tell ya.  So--review the before pictures:

Ugh!  Stuff EVERYWHERE!  I am ashamed.  We sometimes test kids in these rooms during EOGs (all those separate setting kiddos have to have SOMEWHERE to go!), and I wouldn't be able to focus in here.  It's bad, because a lot of our 1:1 students have ADD/ADHD and this would NOT be an ideal setting for any of them.

And now:

I wish there was a better way to take in the entire room!  I need a different angle.  Maybe through the window in the adjoining room later...
Anyway, other than dustiness on the file cabinets and some sloppy, leaning books, I feel really good about this space.  I am going to attack those darn cabinets, but I haven't gotten up the nerve just yet.  I think I'm going to work on the visible mess in the other room first.  Then, I can do all the cabinets simultaneously.  That way, I can clear, combine, and reorganize all of the hidden goodies. 

I'm really glad I signed up for this challenge, even if I don't keep up and I don't follow directions and go in my own order.  I was one of those AIG students who ignored directions when I was in school, too.  I'm sure my teachers hated that.  I'm posting to teacher resource organization because that is what MOST of this stuff is.  Don't really know what else to call it...

My Teacher Area

So...challenges and I have issues, apparently.  I am actually making some progress toward a more organized classroom, but I am failing epically at posting about it.  This is probably because I am...ahem...several weeks behind.  With 27 students, no assistant (but I do have a WONDERFUL tutor 3 days a week), and plenty of committee meetings, there hasn't been a lot of time for me to actually WORK in my classroom.  Well, other than the obvious teaching part.

My teacher work space is not exactly typical.  As I noted before, I got rid of my traditional teacher desk years ago.  I am a clutter queen, so the less space I have to junk up, the less junky I get.  I was accumulating some paper debris and some unnecessary pen/pencil/marker mess, so I worked to streamline my storage and to put things away when I was finished with them.  Sometimes I feel like I need to clean out my desk every time I tell a student to do so.  I feel like a hypocrite when I have sloppiness hanging out everywhere and tell them to get it together!

So again--this is my before:  I really wish I could get that *#%$ TV off the wall...

And here is my after:

Sorry the picture of my red guided reading table is so dark!  I had to stay late to assess a potential new student, and it was getting to that point of day where pictures look bad, with or without flash.

I know this may not look like a big change to some, but the little changes I made make me feel so much better!  I still want to work on my shelves above the counter.  I do use a lot of the books and binders on a regular basis, so I don't want to shove the whole thing away in a dark closet, and I don't really want to put a curtain in front of it.  I think I just need to add some better bookends to hold it all together.  I might get a curtain for the shelf with the boxes of books.  I usually just access that once per unit, which I don't mind covering up.

I still have dust bunny colonies on my computer area.  Is anyone else plagued with a classroom with extreme amounts of dust?  I think it comes from the ancient school design. 

Anyway, here is my progress and here I am {finally} linking up!

Clutter Free Classroom Challenge

So, I know this is theoretically a crafty type blog.  I am diverting from my typical (can you have typical with as few posts as I've written?) post to share my classroom.  I do, after all, have a life beyond making awesome things for my home and my friends. :)

Jodi over at Clutter Free Classroom is posing a challenge for all us teacher folk out here on the interwebs.  We are going to CLEAN UP OUR MESS!  Yes, in all caps.  It WILL happen.

I discovered CFC over the summer when I was spending entirely too much time on Pinterest.  I love her organization strategies for the classroom.  I love having an organized classroom--or rather, love the idea of having one.  My room is the most organized this year that it has ever been.  I moved rooms, and took the opportunity to purge many unneeded items.  Unfortunately, the room I moved to has collected years of clutter.  It has two storage closets in the back that have been collecting teaching supplies since God was a little boy at school here.  Ok, I exaggerate.  But really.  Maybe Moses was here when these closets started getting filled with junk gloriously wonderful teaching supplies.  I am still working on these rooms, but mostly I try to ignore them.  I did work on cleaning them out when my fellow 5th grade teacher retired a couple of years ago, but there is still a long way to go.  The other clutter I have is just random bits and bobs that can't seem to keep a home once they find one.

Here are the revealing and slightly embarrassing pictures:

 

This is my "teacher desk."  I opted out of a traditional one several years ago when I realized it was a dumping ground for unnecessary items.  

 This is my guided reading table, and where I sit to do most of my planning and grading.  The stuff on the window ledge behind the table is my teacher stash--files, stickers, post-its, pens, etc.

This is the counter beside my group table.  My lesson plan book lives here, as well as my copies (in the pretty magazine files), supplies for the week, my Scentsy (fifth graders can really stink!), and my communication folder bin.  My goal is that the supply stash can move to one of the back closets after they are cleaned up a little bit more.

This is the view from my teacher spot at the red table.  I can see out the door (and out the actual door), and I can see that pile of mess under our student supply table.  It needs a bit of work too.  Somehow, we can't seem to put things back in a tidy manner.  I think there might be permanent marker outlines for things in the near future.


And, what you've all been waiting for--the back rooms!  I tried to get good pictures, but the rooms are narrow and long, so it is difficult to see everything.  Here is room one (school-wide science supplies and the old fourth grade teacher's material):

And room two:

By the way, all those filing cabinets aren't mine.  The school data manager keeps files down here too.  That is part of the problem--these rooms are a catch-all, and no one ever worries about what they look like. 

Eeep!  Wish me luck.  I will probably start with the visible areas in the actual classroom, and then tackle the scary rooms it chunks during work days and such.