Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Preschool Organizing

Last week I posted about our new Preschool Curriculum.  Honestly, now that we have new subjects, the amount of materials and activities is just a little overwhelming from an organizational standpoint.  I was definitely used to the routine we had for the Mommy and Me ABC units!  Anyway, here is what I came up with to make it go a little more smoothly!

I made a shelf dedicated to preschool activities and materials.  I have a container for each of the following subjects.:
Math and Patterns
Puzzles
Spanish
Logic and Thinking Skills
Reading/Phonics/Spelling
I also have some games, our site words mats, and our alphabet puzzles, which did not fit into the box.
I also broke up each activity.  Presenting Xander with a box of spelling puzzles like this would be too overwhelming.  He just wouldn't do it.
There was no way I was gong to sort through for all of the corresponding pieces every week. So I took an afternoon and went through all of our materials.  We have a lot of different types of puzzles and activities, so it took a while.  I found all of the pieces that went with each puzzle.  Then I put them in baggies in groups of 2-5, depending on the difficulty of the activity.  
Having individual bags made the boxes a lot less intimidating!
For some activities, dividing into individual baggies didn't make much sense.  For things like our Block Buddies, I just added a baggie for the cards that have been completed.  I'll take a new card and the corresponding pieces each time we plan to use the activity.
To store 3 Part Cards that we haven't used yet, I simply put each set into an envelope marked with the category name.
Then I put each pre-sorted activity into its container by subject.  Now instead of going through each individual box, I just grab one or two activities from each subject bin every week.  At the end of the week, all of the completed activities will go into the Done box (to be sorted at some point in the future).
This is the Reading/Phonics bin.  It has word/picture matching puzzles, spelling puzzles, rhyming puzzles, Beginner Spelling Cards3 Letter Word Cards, digraph puzzles, sight words blocks, and various printed word family activities.
 Here is the Logic/Thinking Skills bin.  It has our block buddies, nuts and bolts, sequencing puzzles, building block templates, construction sort and match, and flashcards.
Here are the Spanish and Puzzle boxes.
This is the Math/Patterning box.  It has number pegs, Oreo Matchin' Middles, addition puzzles, counting bears, a few patterning sets, a geoboard, and a folder with printed pattern cards.
For workbooks and printable materials I use regular boring fiile folders.  I tear out the pages of the workbooks as we use them, then put them in the back of the folder.

I'm still using the weekly goals checklist to make sure I cover each subject.  I also recently added the movie list.

4 comments:

  1. This is all so smart! I have a couple boxes like that with all the puzzle pieces everywhere, and baggies is a great idea! Totally pinning that!

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  2. Hi there! Great ideas! My name is Heather and I have a quick question about your blog! My email is Lifesabanquet1(at)gmail.com :-)

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    Replies
    1. Hi Heather. Sorry, I've had issues with spam in the past and wanted to make sure this wasn't some computer program, so responded here. What is your question?

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  3. That's so great. All I have now is a mental inventory...haha. I thought of doing this but I was already tired before I got started. Definitely on my To do list!

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