A New Year!!

Hello! After a crazy few weeks on holidays in Thailand, I am finally back and finally feeling motivation to get organised for the new school year :) Even though I have been home for a week, yesterday was the first day I actually thought about school which is a little scary considering term starts in three weeks and this is my first year with my own class :/ But never mind, nothing a little shopping frenzy didn't fix!

So one of my goals this year in my classroom is to be organised. I can't work properly when all my things are disorganized and chaotic, but knowing how full on this year is going to be, I know that unless I implement a really simple yet comprehensive organization plan, my year will be hell!And my poor partner will cop the brunt of that, so for the sake of my sanity and relationship, I have come up with some cheap and easy ideas.

Before my holidays, I had a major list of all the new, fantastic, life saving storage designs I would purchase for my classroom. It would have cost a small fortune but I deemed it as a necessity. After going to Thailand and seeing how they lived, I definitely have a new view on what constitutes 'money wasting' and so I decided that I simply could not justify spending hundreds of dollars on organizational 'things' that I'd probably never use anyway.

So, my first storage 'issue' was that I needed a filing system for the week where I could put all of the activities I wanted to do in a box or tub, that was clearly labelled and I could organise my week easily. Here is my solution:

 I bought the fantastic folders with tags from Kmart for $2 (Five folders), the box from a discount shop for $10 and I already had the bull clips to separate the folders. I simply colour code the folders for each day of the week. Now my activities are set out and easy to grab. After I use the activities, I'll file them away in my filing cabinet for next time.

I have a ton of centre activities, and couldn't really figure out how best to store them. Some have small pieces, some have large, some are simply directions on a page. I've tried putting them in folders, bagging them in plastic bags and storing in tubs, but nothing was really working for me. Then I found these amazing A4 pencil cases at a discount shop and fabric ones at Daiso (Daiso is a Japanese shop where everything is $2.80. I discovered it yesterday and the stationary is AMAZING). They are perfect for storing my centres because you can put a whole unit into one bag! And it sits perfectly in the box above :).

I'm a sucker for all things cute so when I saw these adorable macaroon place holder's in Typo for $3, I had to have them for my rotations. Students can easily see where the centres are in the classroom and they are just damn cute.

Being the pinterest addict I am, I have a few bulletin boards I wanted to create. The first is a birthday chart. I have made a cupcake chart where each cupcake is a month, and the candles will have the students name and birth date written on them. I haven't finished the chart yet but here is a preview...

I'm also implementing bucket filling into my class this year, and made a bulletin board for that. This is not nearly finished, and isn't exactly how I imagined it to be, but I'm still thrilled at how it's coming along.

So that's all for now. If you have organizational tips or tricks, please let me know! Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year,

Miss Daniels xx