Sunday, August 19, 2012

The All-Inclusive Teacher Binder

I have an interesting condition: I LOVE organization and the concept of being organized, and I LOVE organizing things, but I am challenged to STAY organized. Can anyone else relate?? I find that I begin school year (or a closet at home lol) on the right foot, and over time I sink back to my bad habits of just shoving papers wherever, grabbing whichever notebook is in reach for a faculty meeting, and even missing meetings because I jotted down the reminder on my other calendar.

So I have started an all inclusive teacher binder this year. I bought myself a large (3") clear-view-cover binder in my favorite color (BLUE!) at Target (love) and 3 packs of tabbed dividers with write-on tabs. I grabbed my Bic Mark It markers and got to work.

I made up a cover sheet with a whale (go figure) that was super easy. I just made a regular page-size paper that says "Mrs. Spence's Classroom Notebook 2012-13" and put a clipart whale in the middle of it, and then made a narrow vertical sheet that and made it say the same thing (this I slid into the spine of the binder--does that make sense?) (Download the customizable file here for free!)

Ok, so next I had to make my dividers. I used my markers and went in rainbow order for the different areas. The dividers I made are:  (and feel free to use the ones you want and change the ones you don't like or can't use)


  • Lesson Plans
  • Monthly Calendars (and I downloaded the entire year's worth of super-cute calendars for FREE from Rowdy in Room 300's TpT store here and plan to use them to record all dates and meetings that I need to remember)
  • Pacing Guides (stay tuned for my own pacing guides)
  • Schedules (for specials, early dismissals, late starts, days with an assembly, etc.)
  • Pennsylvania (or Common Core or your state) Standards
  • Management Information/Substitute Teacher Information 
  • Professional Development (we have to create a professional development project each year OR choose to be observed. My PD plan is to implement Daily 5)
  • Data (with 5 subcategories, all done in the same color!)
    • Progress Monitoring and Intervention (for those of you whose schools are beginning RTI/RTII)
    • STAR Reading and Math (STAR is an online assessment program that we use for benchmarking and progress monitoring)
    • Study Island (we also use SI for benchmarking and progress monitoring/assessment for RTII)
    • SWEBS/PBS (our school-wide behavior model that we collect and turn data in for)

I hope this teacher binder idea can help you out. I plan to take my binder to all faculty meetings and grade-level meetings, as well as data meetings. I hope it works out for me too!








:o)
Ashley

*This post is part of my "Back-to-School" series!*

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