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!*