File Organization to Maximize Planning Time!

Hello teacher friends!  It's Cori from Mrs. B's Beehive with a quick organizational tip for some Winter file clean-up!

If you are anything like me, you have a million resources all over the place.  Resources that belong to your school or district curriculum, resources that you've purchased from TPT over the years, and things that have inherited from other teachers.  Every class is different, and I definitely don't use the same resources every year, so I have quite a collection of resources at my fingertips.

To begin with, I make a curriculum plan for the whole year usually during my summer break.  I try to match-up my different resources, and focus on the same things each week, such as penguins, pumpkins, reindeer, etc. I use this resource to help me see the big picture.

I check my school calendar, and give each week a number.

I transfer the week numbers over to my planning calendar, and I start to organize my files. I label each file with a week number.

I put in all of the resources that I think I will need for the week, including homework and art projects.  I really do use a lot of TPT materials, and over the years I have prepped and laminated so many resources!

I used to keep every resource in a separate binder, and pull out things as I needed them, but storing all of my materials by week has really helped me be efficient in my lesson planning and copy making.

Every Wednesday, I pull out the file for the next week, and fill out my lesson plans on Planbook.com.

If you haven't checked out Planbook before, you really should! It takes a little bit of effort to set-up, and the first year is a little more labor intensive, but it really keeps me organized! I love how easily you can designate standards for each lesson, and get a tally of how many times you have taught each standard in a year.

My copies are already in the folder ready to go.  From year to year, there are some things that I keep, and some things that I change, but this system has saved me an incredible amount of time.  I hit print on my lesson plans, and head off to the copy room!  Honestly, after having this system in place for about 9 years, it takes me a maximum of 30 minutes to complete my lesson plans, and get my copies ready for the upcoming week!

I know this is a super simple technique, and I hope all of you are already using it!  Hopefully it will help some of you out there cut down on your planning time, so that you can focus on one of the other million things on your to do list! : )