Organizing Preschool Classroom Supplies

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I am not an organizer. I want to be. I really do. But that is not my gift. Thank goodness other members of our teaching team are gifted at organizing preschool classroom supplies. In fact, in my 18 years of teaching, this is the first time we are starting a school year completely organized.

It’s not as though we didn’t try in the past. Each August the teachers would meet, decide what needed to be pitched, and tried to put it all back nice and organized. But it never was quite right.

This year we finally got it! And wow, what a difference this is going to make this new school year.

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Organizing Preschool Classroom Supplies

Our preschool resides in the basement of a church. We have a storage closet that all of our classrooms share. Even though we are lucky to have a decent sized storage room, it still felt cramped. In fact, often we had to pile materials on the floor because we didn’t have enough shelf space.

We also struggled every single year with organizing classroom supplies so that teachers could quickly find what they needed.

So, during our last few weeks of summer break we opened our storage room door….

And pulled everything out.

I will be honest. This made me very anxious. We only had 2 days to get this done.

But with everyone’s help, we got the shelves emptied.

And it all went into our classrooms, where we organized them.

Literacy, math, science, fine motor ….

We first put together our theme tubs. We have 4 different levels in our preschool. The 2 and 3 year olds are upstairs and we call them the juniors team. The 4 and 5 year olds are downstairs and we call them the pre-kindergarten team.

For most themes we put together 2 bins for each one – a bin for juniors and a bin for pre-kindergarten. We labeled the outside of the clear containers and filled them.

And then they were placed back on the storage shelves, with September’s bins first and May’s bins last.

We also created bins for our cognitive activities such as shapes, colors, math, fine motor, language and literacy.

Our art supplies are in the next bay, with all of our paint and then assorted craft materials. The see-through containers make it so much easier to find what you are looking for!

Paper also has its own spot.

And then, each classroom has its own storage cabinet inside their room. This is ours. Our new assistant took on the challenge and completely organized it for us. I’ve never seen it so clean!

The baskets above the cabinet are where we keep extra clothing in case of accidents, spills, or just having a lot of fun with art materials!