It’s the end of the school year which means it is time to declutter your classroom in preparation for the new year ahead. So, where do you begin? We will provide you with some tips on how best to declutter your classroom.
- Organising
First of all, find three large boxes. Use one for rubbish, one for items that can be recycled and one for items that you can giveaway.
Sort your items by looking at which category they fall into instead of where they will be located. For example, literacy resources, mathematics resources, reading resources, items for displays etc
- Decision Time
Place each category of items out in front of you and then decide if it something you will use or not. Once you have decided, you can then place the item into one of your three boxes.
- Swap Time
Gather all the teachers in one room and see if you can swap some resources with each other. Swap items such as stationery, resources and books which you do longer need but still have plenty of life in them. It could be that teachers in other key stages have resources that they are not using and could be of use to you.
- Use Stickers
Label all items with a sticky dot. When you use an item, remove the sticky dot. This way the next time you declutter your classroom it will be clear which item you haven’t used all year as they will still have the sticky dots on them.
- Paper Resources
If your classroom is full of printed resources then place them in your filling cabinet, ideally place them in the top drawer. When you use one of these resources place in in a new folder and put it back in the top drawer. Once again, when you get to the end of the teaching year you will see which printed resources you have used and which weren’t used. The ones that you didn’t use, you can either ask other teachers in your school if they would be any use to them. if not, place them in your recycling box.
- What Next?
Once you organised all the items in your classroom it’s time to decide what to do with everything that’s leaving your classroom. Your other options are:
- Storage: if you have large or valuable items that you don’t want to get rid of but are cluttering your classroom, then consider putting them in a self-storage unit. You’ll just need to locate self storage units near me and store them there. This way if you do require the items at any point you still have access to them.
- Recycle: as long as any paperwork does not have sensitive data on it, then remember to recycle these items.
- Give them away or sell them: if you have items that are in good condition and you have no use for them, then consider giving them away or selling them as they may have value to someone else.