Organization - because I love it so!

Goal of the week: Now that the D.O.T. is turned in, I'm goal-less. I like that feeling.

Thought of the day: Organization - because I love it so!

My classroom is slowly getting more organized. I've got a system in place now for a lot of things. These include, but are not limited to the following: going to the bathroom/passes out of the room in general, turning in all work, passing back work, getting the students attention, groupwork, recording grades, and recording negative behavior. One of the best ones that I've come up with was recording the student attendance, Do Nows, and daily work on one sheet of paper for each period. It just allows me more free space with my hands. I also have the board the same way every day.

My favorite thing that I've come up with this year by far is the Homework Calendar. It lets the students know what we've done in class every day in class for the whole semester. I go up and write down what we've done in class each day one one of those 4 dollar desktop calendars that I keep on my bulletin board. I keep all of the past months up on thumbtacks above the current month so the students can reference it at any time. It keeps both them and me organized.

Now, I just need a system for keeping track of the missing work and current grades up to that second. The students want to know what they are missing for the entire semester every single second and they want to know in the middle of class while I am trying to teach. That is so not cool. There needs to be an organized way to deal with that. I just need to think of that. I've tried keeping a spreadsheet for the whole class and that was too disorganized. I've tried keeping spreadsheets for each student but that is so much work to update each night for 150 people. There has to be an easy way to do this. Ugh.