Tips and Tricks for Organizing your Speech or Classroom

If you have ever read our about section you will learn that we are two speechies who blog together. In real life, we also share a classroom and many language and social skills groups. We have found that staying organized is a must when sharing space, great ideas and co-teaching. Here are some of our tricks that we use to stay on our A-game.

1. Supply buckets: Easily access for materials can keep students on track and minimize confusion as they get ready to work. At the front of our classroom we have a supply station with everything needed.  Students can get whatever supplies they need from the cups and containers or take the containers to their work station. 

2. Student work bins: At times we have many students working on tasks. To minimize work sample clutter we have two tubs in our speech room "Finished" and "In Process, "so it is easy to determine who needs additional time with completing language tasks.

3. Bulletin boards: In our room we use bulletin boards for quick reference information. We have posters with synonyms for character's feelings, calendar information and daily learning targets for students. We also use our bulletin boards to quickly reference the phone list, school calendar, our own schedule and some personalized pictures for ourselves.

4. Binders: We organize materials or loose worksheets in binders with labels so anyone coming in knows what materials we have at a glance.

5. Copy and file activities for the month:  Our district uses the 3:1 model, so we have three weeks of direct service and one week of indirect services.  One of our many "to dos" during our indirect week is to assess student learning and plan our activities accordingly.  We create and find our materials, copy them, and then organize them into labeled file folders for the month.  Prior to using this model, we met during our lunch or prep time each week to get the same goal accomplished. 

6. Label shelves and cupboards:  We place our materials on shelves and in cupboards and then label them by type of resource: articulation/phonology, language, fluency/voice, pragmatics, assessments, etc.

7. Shared schedules: Each year we share our schedule with special education staff, office staff, and each other.  We have found this strategy helps when other teachers are trying to find us or each other, and we can let them know exactly where we are.

8. Chart IEPs and assessments for the year: This is very time consuming, but it is SO helpful throughout the year.  (Your invested time will come back to you tenfold.) By doing this during workshop week, we are able to look ahead at our chart to find when assessments and IEPs are due so that we can stay in compliance without scrambling through paperwork at the last minute.  You can download the chart that we use here.

9. Use Post-Its to temporarily label files:  A colleague of ours shared this trick with us last year.  It works so much better than putting label on top of label on top of label.

10. Photo boxes:  We use photo boxes to store a lot of our supplies, especially articulation cards and game pieces.  The boxes provide a place for labels which are changeable.

These are just a handful of simple tricks and tools that we use.  We would be lost without organizing!  We hope you are able to find some of these ideas useful.  Happy organizing!