Paper trails could seriously wipe out our sanity completely. From the back and forth home paper trail to the desk monster hoarder… Having papers all over the place drives us bonkers!
We know we will always have a hoarder whose desk is the Black Hole. You know the ones-you innocently peek into their desks only to be attacked by 47 papers that are barely being contained. Their pencil box and workbooks are the only things stopping the avalanche. Not a single paper has found it’s way into your hands.
We love our system for turning in papers. The Green Box is for “Go” which means go ahead and grade this. The Blue Box is for papers that we’ve already looked at and graded before being turned in.
***Hot Tip*** teach your kids to turn in their papers so each paper faces the one before theirs. A huge Type A Trait time waster is having to flip around upside papers as you’re trying to grade them.
Another Sanity Saver is we keep a few baskets on our book shelf that is located right as our students walk in our door. Buddy Books is our home reading program where a student is assigned a certain day when they return their Buddy Books and Sharing Pages {click here for info on our Sharing Page program}. This is to prevent us having to switch out books for 20+ students in one day!!! The black tray is for any notes or loose papers that need to be turned in.
Organizing our Math Games into individual plastic shoe boxes has been a life saver! We type up the instructions for each of the games on card stock and include them in the boxes (also great for parent helpers). No more hunting for manipulatives, game pieces, dice, etc. Everything is wrapped up in one, nice and neat package! This also makes it extremely easy for our students to grab a box and go find a friend to play the game with. Clean up is easy when everything is thrown placed orderly back into the box.
Small cardboard magazine boxes are perfect for storing individual books. We call these our “Book Boxes” (we know…super original!). Here, our kiddos have books that are just the right readers for them. We number the boxes and each student is assigned a number for the entire year that corresponds with their name.
This way we can also use them year after year!
Do you have some great sanity savers? We want to here about them! Leave a comment below and Link Up with our friends over at Blog Hoppin’. Here’s to saving our sanity, one tip at a time!
