Organizing Lesson Materials and Resources

Are you used to creating lesson materials and getting rid of them after being done with teaching the lesson? Do you throw away your sentence stems, lesson planner, and other materials at the end of the year? Do you have random piles of materials and papers around your room? Do you have a bin where you randomly put away all lesson materials hoping that next year you will have the time to organize them all? If you said yes to one or more on the questions above, you need to keep reading! 

Here are some tips!

Don't feel like reading? Listen to my episode on Organizing materials in my Podcast "5 Minute ELD" 

1. Keep your lesson materials and your planner - If it is your first year teaching ESOL or you are new to teaching ESOL and feel your lessons might need some tweaking or you just didn't feel a lesson went as expected, don't throw away your lesson idea or materials you made for it. Keep them for next time (if you teach the same lesson to a different group) or next year. One reason you should do this is because you already taught the lesson and found things that could go better, use the materials and the lesson plans you made and make changes to them to make them better for next year or the next time you have to teach the same lesson/topic. This way, you are not starting from scratch and you already know what doesn't work, so you will remember not to make the same mistakes. 

Another tip that goes along with this idea is to keep your lesson planner so you can go back the following year and read the lessons you did for specific units. Remember to take notes during the year on your planner about what went well or didn't work so well, so that when you go back to it your notes are there for you to remember this important information. Think of this practice as a quick reflection on your lessons. 

2. Use plastic bins to store materials - I used to recycle cardboard boxes and use them to put away all my classroom resources and materials for the next year. But, I learned that towards the end of the year, everyone is looking for boxes and sometimes there weren't  enough left for me. I would end up feeling stressed because I didn't finish putting away things before the last day and felt I had to rush. I also found that during the Summer, custodians move all boxes around to clean or to move things to other rooms and cardboard boxes are not that resistant to all that moving so they will end up breaking or tearing apart allowing dust to get in the boxes or even worse, insects or mice could get into the materials. This is why I started buying plastic bins of different sizes to put away my teaching things. They are more resistant and keep my materials safer than cardboard boxes. I also have a smaller plastic bins, like the ones on the picture to place my ELD lesson materials. I have one of these smaller plastic bins for each content area I teach. 

3. Keep materials in Ziplock bags - I organize my lesson materials in Ziplock bags by units or topics. For example, if I made sentence stems and printed out pictures for a lesson on the rock cycle. I would put all these into a Ziplock bag labeled rock cycle and then place this Ziplock bag in a bigger one labeled with the unit's name, in this case, Landforms. This way I can keep all the materials for the lessons I did during the Landforms unit organized by topic in the same bag so I can easily find them the following year. Then, I can make changes or just reuse the lesson materials. I place all Ziplock bags in the plastic bins I described above by content area. For example, all math materials and resources go in the math plastic bin and so on. I have a bin per content area. 

Remember to put away the lesson materials in the specific Ziplock bag after you're done teaching the lesson, this way you will avoid having a bunch of materials laying around your classroom or workspace.

4. Have a designated place to put important papers in your room-  Having a designated space or place is helpful so that you can avoid having your desk overflowing with random papers and so that you can find them when you need them. Some ideas for to do this is to have a binder to place allergy lists, schedules, PD documents or other papers that you might receive during the year. Have another binder or bin to place the materials for the lessons your are teaching during the week and put these back on their designated Ziplock bags and plastic bin after you are done teaching the specific lesson. 

If you want to see and example of how I organize my materials check out my post on Instagram here.  To see an example of how I pack up my classroom at the end of the year, click here. 

Below are the *links to the following items: 

• Plastic bins 

• 4x6 Zip lock Bags

• Sandwich size Zip lock bags

I hope these 4 tips help you with organization during the year. What other organization tips do you know? 

*Amazon affiliate links.