Storage Cabinet Organization Part 1- Pinterest Projects!

The 2-door cabinet in my room is usually a train wreck.  It is the place where everything goes that does not need to be accessible for students all the time.  This includes things like copy/construction paper, lab/activity supplies, bulletin board supplies, extra art materials, etc.

 

My dream cabinet (besides being much bigger) would have all matching containers and such, but for now, I'll settle for simply organized. 

 

Pinterest has been a huge help in finding solutions for all of my teacher things, and here are a few of the ideas that I have used to organize some of my things for this year. 

 

The first thing I wanted to tackle was the plastic bag disaster.  I have lots of laminated card games (mostly vocabulary) and activities with small pieces.  Until recently, I would have 15 sets of cards, either rubber-banded or in sandwich bags stuffed into a plastic grocery bag.  There were about 10-12 grocery bags full of stuff crammed into empty spaces in the cabinet, and I could never tell what was inside of them.  I don't have a "before" picture because it was just that pitiful.

 

Pinterest had lots of solutions, of course, and this is what I chose to do. 

 

I started with these zippy pencil pouches that I got in my first round of school shopping.  I had been waiting for this item in particular in the back-to-school area because I wanted them cheap and I needed lots of them.

 

I liked these because they had the see-thru side and they came in nice bright colors. I got about 18-20 of these so that I would have plenty to put my vocab games in and have extras for other stuff.

 

Then, I took these baskets that I already had from last year.  I think these came in a set from Wal-Mart.

 

I loved these baskets because you can stack them together as long as the basket isn't too full.  The handles fold in and make a little shelf for you to stack another one on top. 

 

The last thing I needed were labels for the pouches.  I didn't want to write directly on them with a sharpie, just in case I want to use them for another purpose in the future.

 

 

As you can see, I just wrote whatever the cards were on the sticky labels.  I ended up having several extras, so I even put some of my word wall vocab into them.  In some cases, all of the sets of cards would not fit into one pencil case, so I just split them in half and put them into two.  I made sure to put a little (2) on the label so that I'd know there was another case.

 

Then, I just put all of the pieces in the cases, zipped them up and put on the labels.

 

When I was finished, I stacked them sideways into the red baskets.

 

 

I ended up using two baskets for all of my stuff--I still had some pencil cases left over, and they are just stuck in the back of each basket with a blank label already on them. This way, if I create a new acticity, I have a home waiting for it once we finish using it.

 

This is how they look in my cabinet now:

 

I am happy with how these turned out!  I can just flip through the cases to find what I need without having to dig through my old grocery bags.  The one thing I might change is the position of the sticky labels.  I wish I had put them at the top side so that it was a little easier to read, but that is an easy change to make.

 

I got this idea from a blog called Penny Pumpernickel Pants.  They used these to organize puzzles at home, but I think it translated well to my class.

 

The next thing I wanted to tackle was the construction paper.  I had about 30 different packs, different sizes/colors (all open, of course).  I had them stacked on top of each other, which was not a good system.  Whenever the students or I needed a color from the bottom, it pulled out paper from the top and left a mess in the stack. 

 

So, I took a plastic file crate that I already had in my room and a big stack of hanging file folders and made this:

 

I LOVE this new system.  Now, I can just take the whole crate out and set it on my front table when we are using construction paper and the students can choose any color, no problem.  Or, if I just want one color, I can grab that folder and bring it out of the crate. 

 

The original idea came from this post at Two Things in Common.  Her paper is in a big drawer in a filing cabinet, but I like that mine is portable!

 

The last thing was some storage for my bulletin board decorations.  Specifically, I needed a way to store the borders.  I have tons of them, and I hate rolling them up and bending them. 

 

 I saw this idea using 3M Command hooks and binder clips on Finally in First.  To begin with, I didn't think this would work for me even though I loved it, because my cabinet has shelving and the borders would not be able to hang straight.

 

Then, I realized that I could hang the hooks on the back of the cabinet doors and it would work--so that is exactly what I did.

 

 

I already had two packs of the command hooks in my desk that I didn't have a use for, so this was perfect.  I don't have all of the borders hanging up there yet, but you can see how it looks.  I also used it for some longer word wall vocab that would not fit in the zippy pencil cases at the beginning of this post.

 

Part 2 of my cabinet organization will be up soon! :)