My Back to School Teacher Binder

I'm convinced that this is the year that I will become totally and completely organized. The beginning of the school year is a perfect chance for a fresh start, right? I'm armed with a binder, organizational pages, my new teacher vision board for the cover and my stash of colorful pens. Let's do this!

The Binder

I purchased a one inch white binder with clear pockets on all sides for my Teacher Binder. I'm designing it specifically to hold the teaching essentials that I use all the time. Having a smaller binder makes it easier to find what I need. You bet your bottom dollar that I rely on the giant ones for student information and yearly lesson plans!

The Cover

Teachers Pay Teachers has gobs and gobs of the most beautiful binder designs. I do plan on purchasing some for other binders I'll need this school year, but I wanted to give this binder a personal touch. I used my teacher vision board that I created last week and slid it right into the clear pouch on the front of the binder. It will be a great reminder of my dreams and goals for the new school year.

The Pages

A while ago I created one of my classroom staples: Binder Pages for the Organized Teacher. I love that I can mix and match them with different binders to keep me organized throughout the year.  This particular binder will have my classroom essentials:

1. Class Rosters
2. Important Contact Information and School Resources
3. Team Meeting Minutes
4. Staff Meeting Minutes
5. Curriculum Sequence (a print out from my school)
6. Lesson Plans

I don't keep all my lesson plans in this binder - just the ones for the week or unit. I have a separate binder for my collection of lessons for the year and another binder dedicated to student information. I'm adding a substitute binder and field trip binder to the collection this year, too. I'll definitely blog about those once they're created!

Organizing the Binder

When setting up my binder, I use dividers for each section so that I can quickly find what I need. 

The binder itself is purposefully on the thin side as I consider it my "grab and go" binder for fire drills, and staff or team meetings.

Organizing the pages itself is super easy. I just place the pages in the appropriate section and I'm ready to go! While my class roster (until a new student is added) and curriculum scope and sequence sections stay the same all year, I do add enough blank pages in the meeting notes and lesson plans sections to take me through the first weeks of school. When I see that I'm running low on blank copies of the meeting notes, for example, I print out about 10 more pages and add them to the binder. Sometimes those meetings pop up at the last minute and I always want to be ready to go!

Voila! Now my Teacher Binder is ready to go for the school year. I'll be posting about my Field Trip Binder, Substitute Binder and Student Information Binder, too, so come back and visit the blog again! :)