Back to School Pinterest Style

Pinterest is a great go-to place for ideas. It has everything you don't think about googling. I have been pinning school ideas on there ever since I got Pinterest. This summer as I prepared to go back to school, I went through all of my school pins and pulled a few ideas to implement. In case you're looking for some new ideas, here is what I think about what I tried.

MATH NOTEBOOKS
My first year, I got so tired of students never having paper to take notes on and finding several pages of notes left on the floor after each class. So, last year I started using notebooks. I bought every students a spiral notebook for them to do their warm-ups and notes in. That's about all of the guidelines I gave them. We kept the notebooks in the class in a bin. Since I wasn't clear on how I expected them to use their notebooks, they got messy quick. Students would flip to a random page to do their warm-up, then flip back 2 or 3 pages and start their notes for the day. They would rip pages out and stuff other random papers in them. Handing them out everyday was also a hassle. I either had all 30 students at the bin trying to dig their notebook out or all 30 students talking and off task while they waited for someone to pass out the notebooks. Both ways made starting class really hard.

So, this year I changed a few things. I read through several blog posts, but pulled most of my ideas from this blog. Instead of spiral notebooks, we're using composition notebooks. They aren't as tempting to rip paper out of. We made a folder in the front of the notebook to store anything we don't finish for the day. We all made a cover page. I had students glue in a list of expectations and a rubric so they know exactly what is expected of them. We set up a table of contents and we filled in our notebooks together for three days in a row. That way I knew they knew what I expected of them. So far, they have been so much better. They also keep the notebooks in the room under their desk in a plastic bin. That way they can come in and get started immediately. My bins are numbered and color coded so when we get in groups, it's easy for students to put the desks back in the right order.

SOAP BOXES
Who would have thought a cheap soap box could be such an easy solution. You may remember from this blog post that I spent over an hour organizing my decks of cards because I'm OCD like that. My boxes were in bad shape which is part of the reason my cards were so mixed up. After I organized them all back into full decks or got them as close to a full deck as I could, I numbered them. So, every card in deck 1 has a 1 on the back of it and so on. I was smart enough not to waste time doing all 13 decks myself...I got students to do the numbering for me. Before school started, everywhere was sold out of soap boxes thanks to college students moving back and school starting. Last week Wal-Mart had finally re-stocked them. Now each of my decks of cards are in a numbered soap box. When I find a random card on the floor, I'll know exactly which deck it belongs to. Genius I tell you, genius! If you check out this lady's blog post, you'll see she has lots of other cool uses for soap boxes!

GET TO KNOW YOU FACEBOOK PROFILE
I found a facebook profile sheet that students could use to fill in their information. The "get to know you" sheets I've used in the past took the students FOREVER to fill out. It had way too many questions on it. This one got me all of the necessary information (name, contact info, etc) and had a few questions (what's your favorite color, food, etc) the let me know a little bit about the student. The best part was students were able to complete it in a reasonable amount of time the first day. The link for it isn't working anymore, but thankfully I saved it. If you want to see it, let me know; I'll email it to you.

I've got a few more Pinterest ideas pulled to use with specific units. I'll let you know how they work out! I'm loving all of these organizational tips! My life is so much more calm at school when my classroom flows in an organized way!