Monday Made-It {July 7}

Do you ever get positively giddy about something?  It happens to me.  Kinda a lot.  Especially when organization and binders come into play.  I was exploring Pinterest the other day and I stumbled upon Ladybugs Teacher Files’ (love that girl!) post about her All-in-One Teacher Binder.   Kristen’s post then led me to Kindergarten Works post about HER teacher planning binder.  

Seriously, I was in heaven.  And I knew that I needed to stop all other projects in order to make my own teacher binder.  So this is my Monday Made-It project!

I have jumped on the Melonheadz bandwagon in a BIG way, so you might see a theme to my binder.  I started with a cute cover with my name is at the top.

Then I created labeled tabs to go on the side.  I’m not going to lie, these took me a long time to do.  I am a bit a lot OCD and needed them to be exactly perfect.  I printed out circles, cut them out and taped them to the back of each divider page.  I then laminated the whole page for durability.

My labels include: schedules, calendar, plans, notes, grades, data, curriculum, and contacts. In the past, I have had separate binders for each of these.  This year, I am trying to keep everything together so that I have it all at my fingertips when I need it.  This past year, I’ve found myself running back to my classroom during meetings because I forgot something.

Here are a few of the sections in action.

I am not a fan of store-bought plan books.  They just don’t work for me.  Instead, I create my own template based on my schedule.  I type up a basic outline of my classes and then hand-write my plans in.  You can check out my editable plan book pages here.  This also allows me the flexibility of changing my schedule if I need to.

In fifth grade, our classes are departmentalized so we share all of our students.  We have meetings throughout the week to discuss their progress.  So this year I am keeping my basic data altogether.  I will teach reading and writing, but have different students in those classes.  I made myself a reading data page and a writing page.  There is room for 3 students on each page and I will copy them back to back.  This is just a quick overview glimpse of each student.

I also wanted to have our curriculum and the CCSS at my fingertips.  I typed up an outline of our year for the subjects that I am teaching (although it will probably change).  I also added in “I Can” statements to follow our curriculum.

At the end, I made a parent contacts section.  I have two cards per page and will copy these back to back as well.  It has student name and birthday, as well as parent phone numbers and emails.  At the bottom, I made a log for when I contact the parent.