Time Saving Tips - Organizing Copies and Originals

Any teacher knows that copy time is precious.

 
My first year I was a disaster, I never had what I needed when I got to the copier, which by the way is quite aways from my room! I've gotten a bit more organized over the years and it really paid off last year.















Walmart had these fashionable expanding file folders last year and I knew it was exactly what I needed. Each subject area is in its own colored file. I printed what I need for the year and I either bring the whole file, or just pull out what I need to copy for the following week.


The pink file is for my math originals:

Hundreds charts
The Crazy Pre-K Classroom's scissor skills sheets
Math Journals from Mrs. Wills


The orange has homework:

Miss Kindergarten's morning work (I use her math sheets for homework)
handwriting sheets with my students first and last names, I use handwriting practice.net.


The blue has my ELA originals:


The green file has science and social studies activities, as well as handouts for my Bee Binders, Open House, Parent Conferences and more!

To label these files, I use Post-It's filing tabs (Amazon affiliate link, thanks for supporting my blog) and a fine tip Sharpie. These tabs are the best as you can move them around repeatedly without bending the paper or smudging the ink.


This saved me so much prep time during the school year. The best part is, everything is waiting for me in the fall!

Anything that I printed in color needs to be reprinted, and throughout the year I added in a few more items. 

But overall, I have very little to prep when it comes to the items that I use consistently each week!

4 comments

  1. Thank you! I love this idea and have been teaching 31 years but never thought of organizing it quite like this. So happy to see this idea!

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  2. I was looking for expandable file folders when I came across the photo of these 4 expandable file folders. I have the exact same ones from Walmart and I bought all the 4 of them in 2015 as well! How cool is that :D They still work great and their bright colors make me so happy. I ended up giving the orange and the blue ones to two of my close friends and kept the pink and the green ones myself. :)

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    Replies
    1. I love the bright colors too! It makes my desk look more cheerful! 😂

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