This post is the 4th and final installment in my Classroom Minimalism mini-series. Check out the previous posts on creating an intention for streamlining, reducing paper clutter, and curtailing your curriculum materials.
I have a confession to make…this is what my storage closet looked like for 75% of this school year. Yikes! If you’re like me, you start the new year with all these intentions about how smoothly things are going to go and then by October, you’re back in day-to-day survival mode. I manage 7 different curricula across grades PreK-8 and I have a toddler at home, so properly taking care of my materials when I complete a project doesn’t often rise to the top of my to-do list. So, what does a rational person do — they shut the door and try to forget about it!
Quick side note: I do know how lucky I am to even have a storage space that affords me the possibility of my stuff being “out of sight, out of mind.” When I was teaching second grade, I stored books in plastic totes in my classroom bathroom because there was no other place to put things.
Shutting the door and not having to look at the mess can be great in a pinch, but unfortunately, this often means that the problem compounds and the scope of the mess grows and feels even more insurmountable. This spring, I had a key realization that the reason I wasn’t properly taking care of my things was that I didn’t have a structure for where things went. I, of course, had a general idea of where things were — organized chaos at its finest — but my supplies were always exceeding their containers or I’d get new things and then shelf shuffling was required to find everything a home. And who has time to shelf shuffle in March? Not me!
So, this year, instead of just doing my usual storage closet clean-out at the end of the year, I opted to apply minimalism to my storage space to hopefully solve my supply clutter problem once and for all. Read on for a few tips and to see my streamlined and much-improved storage space!
Tip #1: Store All Like Items Together
For me, it’s rubber bands. As I tidied my classroom, I found no fewer than 5 different containers housing rubber bands. No wonder I keep ordering more! When streamlining your supplies, start by sorting by type of supply and make sure you round up every last one of a particular item. Yes, this might make the organizing project more time-consuming, but it will pay off when you can finally keep accurate tabs on your inventory.
Caveat: I do have a Maker Closet and have bins of materials that students access — I kept those, but am now storing all of my surplus items together so I know right where to go when it’s time for a refill.
Tip #2: Let the Container Be a Boundary
Once you’ve got your piles of like items, it’s time to give them a home. Previously, I’ve chosen which container to use based on the quantity of a given item I need to store. Reasonable right?
But, simply finding a container that holds everything won’t help you streamline your supplies. Instead, look over your containers and ask, “Which one seems like the appropriate size for the quantity of this supply that I want to manage?” Once you make that decision, keep what fits in the bin and make a plan for re-homing the rest. (Could you share with another teacher? Donate them? Send them home with students in a craft bag?)
This tip worked wonders for me in my storage space. I don’t do a lot of challenges or projects that require bubble wrap, yet I had two full boxes and a whole roll of the stuff. As I was tidying, I set the surplus out on a counter to deal with later and one of our Ed Techs asked me about it — it turned out that she ships breakables in an online venture and was happy to take the extra off my hands.
Also keep in mind that the right container size for a given item might be no container at all. I haven’t used compasses (the circle-drawing tools) once since I started teaching STEM, so I let them go instead of continuing to store them.
Tip #3: Leave Empty Space
If you’ve been teaching STEM for more than a minute, you know that people are often very eager to offer you materials that they just know could be helpful for your projects. Sometimes they are, and sometimes they are very much not, but it can feel discourteous to refuse them (though I’m working hard on saying “no”). And, of course, STEM does require having lots of different materials on hand — I know that I use a wide range of things over the year and often need to order new supplies to use for new tasks and projects. The point I’m making is that you should leave space for future accumulation of items because it’s inevitable that you’re going to find yourself with new things to store. By building in space for these future items, you save yourself the challenge of having to shelf shuffle — you’ll already know where those items can find a home.
Okay, now it’s time for the big reveal. What does my storage space look like after applying these principles of minimalism? Drumroll please!
A few highlights include…
- Freeing up floor space to pull a desk into my storage space that I use for storing items but that I hated having in the main classroom space.
- An empty shelf and clear surfaces for storing materials that I’m actively using. This will help me achieve my goal of not storing project materials on the counters in my classroom.
- A single row of boxes on top of the storage closet. No more toppling as I try to grab things!
This concludes my Minimalism in the Classroom mini-series. I hope that you’ve found this set of posts helpful as you consider how managing less stuff can free you up to focus on what really matters — putting engaging lessons in front of your students.
School supplies image by ds_30 on Pixabay.
Rubber band image by stevepb on Pixabay.