My Teacher Binder

I promised you a post on my teacher binder and here it is.

This year I decided to treat myself and purchased three Martha Stewart binders from Staples. I'm a bit of a stationary nut and I love the line. The green one is my "teacher" binder, the brown is for coordinator stuff and the little one is for my yearbook stuff.

To start with I have six copies of semester calendars, one for each class I teach. I like to have a quick view of what's planned as I find it helps keep me on track. Of course each has a small tab with the class name on it. This means that it looks a little crazy but I find the tabs make it easier to quickly find the class I need. My semester calendars are right at the front of my binder and not behind any divider.

My first divider is for daily lesson plans (you can download the template I made here). Within that each class had its own section (again marked with a small tab). When I designed my lesson template I made sure to put in a section to list things I need to photocopy. In the past I've just kept notes on random sheets of paper, but as you can imagine its not organized and loose paper tends to disappear.

After that is Marks and then Attendance. Each has its own divider since I like to keep these separate, again for easy location and reference. The templates for both of these are the same for obvious reasons, but again each class is separated with a small tab.

Finally comes the less fun stuff, Emergency Procedures (I think that one's self explanatory), General Policies, Other (this is where I keep the other general information we get in our start of the year packet), and Notes (for taking notes at staff and parent meetings).I also have loose-leaf at the back of my binder along with a zippered pocket for keeping small things.

So that's my binder, I'm excited to see if the templates and layout work for me this year and I will more than likely modify it as time goes on. If you do anything differently with your teacher "binder", even if its not a binder, I would be interested to hear about it.

As promised the other templates I created are available for download below.

Calendar
Marks & Attendance