Reorganizing My “Home” Classroom

Mondays are much better in the summer, don’t you agree? I’ve been enjoying every second of this summer so far (even if the weather is moderate, at best). Over the past few years I have danced the unemployed teacher shuffle. Moving in and out of classrooms and collecting materials for every and all grade levels, never knowing where I would end up. Last week I finally tackled the daunting project of organizing the materials that I store right here in my house! As I’ve mentioned before, this tutoring thing requires me to have a lot of my materials ready to grab so I couldn’t just tuck the boxes away for the summer. These shelves though…wait until you hear about these. I was at Target last week in the home goods area and I overheard an employee say “Ugh I should just buy these stupid shelves so we don’t have to keep finding a place for them. I can’t believe they haven’t sold yet they are 70% off!” My ears perked up and I came around the aisle to see what shelves she was talking about. Ever since I moved into my new house I have been looking for bookcases for my office that wouldn’t be too pricey. I even went to Ikea and still felt like I couldn’t quite splurge on the nicer looking shelves there. The woman at Target told me that they were the last thing left from the furniture department that they had to get rid of because they were changing all of the home goods to the Threshold brand. They were originally $129.99 and I got them for $37.98 each!!! Then with my Red Card and 5% off my total was $73 for both matching bookcases. Are you kidding me?!? It was truly one of the best deals ever and it was just the motivation I needed to organize my at-home classroom. I should have taken “before” photos but if you can just imagine a hundred cardboard boxes with foam dice and dry-erase markers sticking out from everywhere and all over my entryway, office and craft room, then you can imagine what my house looked like for a minute. Whew, I love me some organizing! 

Here is the final product!

Turns out photo boxes fit leveled readers perfectly so that’s my new “home-approved” looking way of storing leveled readers. In the basket on the floor I have Ziplock baggies of laminated games, flashcards and activities. 

Chevron totes (Target, old), Wicker cube (Target), photo boxes (Michaels)

In this corner I tucked away all of the “classroom” looking stuff- plastic bins and these colored drawers which I realllllly don’t like having in my house but I have no choice because of math materials so I put them in this little nook that only I can see if I go really out of my way to see.