make-up work and paper organization

This time of year, I always get a little nervous about school starting. I am definitely a perfectionist (not necessarily a good thing) and I want my classroom to be completely ready to go so that I can spend the first couple work days planning and not decorating/organizing.

Disclaimer: A lot of these ideas are not my own. I have so many fellow teachers to give credit to. One of the first things I learned is it is okay to borrow others' ideas. I get most of my stuff off Pinterest! I wanted this to be a place where I could share things that have worked and NOT worked for me.

Disclaimer #2: It's okay if things don't work. Revamp it and try it again...or you can be like me and write a note to yourself in all caps saying, "DO NOT DO THIS EVER AGAIN."

For me, because I have so many students (I'm counting on having between 150-180 this year), I really struggled to figure out a way to efficiently hand back papers. I found this idea on Pinterest and implemented it in my own classroom last year. It works really well if you have someone like a TA that can put the papers in the folders. It can be really time-consuming. This also works really well for elementary school and middle school teachers in that you can save the kids' papers in their folders until conference time. Then you have papers to show parents. I have my kids take them out, review them, and either correct them for more points or put them in their binders.

Mine say, "You've got mail!" Of course, you can make yours say whatever you'd like. To save time, I had the kids write their own names on the tabs on the first day of school. At the start of the year, each class had their own color of folder, but second semester so many kids switched that I had to put labels in front of each class saying what hour it was.

Okay, now for make-up work (the crate on the right). This has also been a huge struggle for me. I realized I was in trouble within the first couple weeks of teaching when I had 8 students absent one day and they all asked me what we did the day before. I couldn't remember. Sounds stupid, but it happens. And it happens to me every day. So I made a folder for each hour and at the end of each school day, I take all the work we did in that hour and put it in the folder. If we did something that wasn't on a sheet, I typed up a quick bulleted list of what we did and put it in the folder for them to pick up. It could say anything from "Please copy yesterday's new vocabulary from a friend" or "You missed a game! Please make up the participation points by seeing the directions on the wall."

This seems to work really well, but it is really time-consuming (notice a trend here?) to put the kids' names on their work and put it in that hour's folder.

I also ran into the problem of not being able to tell who was turning in make-up work and who was turning in late work. I came up with some pink slips that go along with the make-up work. Kids have to fill them out and say the dates they were absent, staple it to the assignment, and turn it in. Then I know not to count it late. I found it helpful to post directions about this. With 7 classes, it can get confusing for students as to what each teacher wants for his/her make-up work.

Has anyone else tried something in their classroom that worked really well? Let me know in the comments section!

#classroomorganization