Teachers across the nation struggle with keeping an overwhelming number of papers organized. Whether you teach kindergarten or high school, you no doubt have piles that need to be kept and dealt with at a later date, but no one systems works for everyone. The trick is the find the system that works for you. Here is a list of my favorite ideas, tips, and hacks for keeping student work to be graded and copies of worksheets for upcoming lessons in easy to find systems. Our class time is so valuable for wasting time sorting through piles and our family time is too important to lose anytime to shifting papers around the dining room table. Hope you find a solution that works for you!
My personal system is a combination of several strategies.
- First, I keep one tub for each day of the week that is large enough to hold 8.5 x 11 paper flat. I like a tub without a lid so that it can hold more than paper. As a prep a unit I can put in student copies of papers, manipulatives for math lessons, and supplies for science labs.
- To keep my units organized I use a binder for each unit with a pocket divider in the front that holds task cards and game pieces.
- To eliminate papers piles wating to be graded I hightly recommend grading smarter, grade them while you are sitting at the teacher table. This has multiple benefits. First, you are not trying to track them down to grade later. Second, it keeps kids focused because they know they can’t leave your table until it’s finished. Third, and most beneficial, the students get immediate feedback. Reteaching and additional practice happens right away. Finally, I can hand it back right away and have the student file it their take home folder saving me from spending my time to do that later. I know some of you are thinking about homework, which is a topic for another day but I assign very little and don’t take more than a completion grade on it.
- For those papers that can’t be graded immediately, I keep one tray. My rule is that it has to be empty by Friday or I have to put some of it in the “special file” (a.k.a. the trash can). No one has ever asked me for a paper that went to the special file!
- For graded papers, I use a file box with a folder for each child, in alphabetical order and quickly file those for kids to take home at the end of the day or week.
Here are a few more creative ways to think about paper management from other amazing teachers!