Organizing Student Cubbies

It takes awhile to settle into a classroom.

 

In kindergarten my classroom set-up changed more times than I can even think about over those 9 years.  But by last year, I pretty much had everything set up in the way that best worked for me and my class.

 

So moving into a new, much smaller room, with a lot less storage space has been an adjustment for me over the past few months.

 

It wasn't until I was typing up my classroom tour post last month, you check it out here, that I saw some areas that need my attention.  Like NOW!

 

The first area was my student cubbies.

 

I have 3 of these shelves and they work perfectly for holding extra student supplies.  All students have their Bee Buck pocket, extra crayons, and extra markers inside their own cubby.

 

But it wasn't until I saw these three pictures that I realized how much space I was wasting and how sloppy it all looked.

 

 

Those sideways Bee Buck pockets are driving me insane!

 

My color paper on the top shelf is a hot mess!

So I went to Walmart and bought every drawer set they had, seven total.

 

I'd like a few more later on, but the 7 sets gave me 21 drawers, so it would fit all of my student's things.

 

Then I created some labels on my computer, printed them out on regular paper, and ran them through this awesome sticker maker machine.

I'm in love with this sticker maker and used it to make labels for my daily work drawers, pencil drawers, and extra crayon drawers.

 

You can change out the cartridges, so the one I used laminates the top of the paper and applies a permanent sticker to the bottom. 

 

Perfect for labels!

 



Here are my labels, printed, cut, and ready to go.

 



Oh happy day!

So much better!

The best part is that now instead of using 20 of my 24 cubbies, I'm only using 7 for student cubbies.  So now I can organize my color copy paper and other things in the extra cubbies!

 

I'm going to put the color copy paper in some more of these drawers, as soon as Walmart replenishes their supply.  And I need a drawer set to put in that big gaping hole at the bottom of the cubbies.



My students still have easy access to their extra supplies.

 

Yet I'm not wasting so much precious storage space.

 

Well worth the cost to have extra storage space, in my opinion.