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RSSFriday, June 25, 2010
Lamination Station!
Well school is out and it is time to be productive! I plan on actually doing something this summer ~ not just taxi-ing my son around to his various baseball camps. As summer came to a close last year I felt very disappointed in my accomplishments, or lack there of. There are so many things I say - well if I had time I would do this or that, when in actuality I had time but I wasted it watching Dr. Phil or Oprah.
So for my first productive task - getting up and ready for teaching next year. This year I felt very unprepared and always rushing to get things done. I brought all my files from school home to organize. I have a binder where I keep the lessons that I have taught. Then I have piles of lesson ideas - things I want to teach or modify to teach, I have the usual school/HR/management type paperwork. And I have student handouts and resource materials. So I am setting up files to organize all this and get all the piles that collect throughout the year off my desk!
I started sorting all the lesson ideas into categories. Here it is in the early stages. I used port-its to start off so I could create folders that alternated tabs.
Then I have 2 other boxes that have student handouts and Admin/School/HR stuff in the other:
I have a large file cabinet at school which is very underutilized, basically because I keep everything in piles instead of files!
I decided I wanted to get all my class sets of handouts ready to laminate. At my school the laminator is like made out of gold and only one person holds the key to it. You have to submit your items and the gold key holder only laminates once a week. Well that doesn't really cut it with me being the control freak that I am. So I usually just let things go without laminating - or I don't have them ready in time to wait a week for them. We do however have a Teacher Resource Center in my county. It is a central office that has all kinds of equipment and materials to use or check out. It has a binding machine, LOTS of die cuts, paper cutters, and yes TWO laminators!! Where I can actually feed my own items in all by mybigself! It is just hard to get to it during the year, luckily it is open in the summer. You just call up and say turn on the laminator and by the time you get there it is heated up and ready to go!
I color coded all my class sets by table; laminated them, hole punched and connected them with a metal ring. I have several lessons where students use resource materials to help them along. For the 5th grade illuminated letters lesson I printed out info and several decorative fonts. For 4th grade Aztec Calendar symbol drawing and clay tile I give students a few copies of the Calendar and some Aztec design pages from a Dover clip art book. For the 1st grade aboriginal dot paintings I give students some animal pictures to draw from. 2nd grade Native American pinch pots student look at Dover clip art of Navajo, Hopi, and Pueblo designs. 3rd grade Instrument Collage students get illustrations of instruments to help them.
This should help a lot in that students can help keep things organized. I found that all the handouts were getting thrown into one pile and it would take me forever to hand them out to the tables for the next class. I can easily keep them in a file and pull them out when I need them - some get used for more than one lesson.
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2 comments (+add yours?)
What size are you using for your laminated student handouts?? I use A4 and purchased my own laminator. It is quicker and can be done at home.
Cheryl H
Perth
Australia
impressive!
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