Binder Organization

I thought that I would do a couple things in this entry to talk about organization for an elementary music teacher.  This is HUGE!!!  Most schools don't have either a set curriculum or a set of resources for the music teacher, so it becomes a hodge podge of creating your curriculum from what you know and what you can make or get with your tiny budget!  Being inspired by a 1st grade teacher who puts all her stuff into binders, I decided to do the same thing.  I seperated by binders into the following categories...

The reason why I had Instruments and Rhythms in their own binder is because we do both in every grade level in my district, so they have a LOT of resources.

In each binder there are lesson plans that go with the subject.  That way you can just add lessons as you come up with new ideas every year and take out ones that weren't successful.

All of the resources I use from books were also copied.  This way you don't have to go through your books looking through to find where it is.  You have the resource written down on the top corner (5th grade book, 4th grade book, Railroad CD, etc.), and I highlighted the CD track number so I could easily play the song for the kids.

I also like to use power points in my lesson, so I print out the power points so I know what is coming next and when I've got to switch slides nd whatnot.  All making your life a little easier!

Then you've got tests and projects in there as well, so you have a master to make copies from if you need them.

Again, all of this is so you can have everything in one spot when you are lesson planning.  Then, paired with my lesson plan book, I look through the week and decide what to do.  In the example below, you can see that there are some classes with X's in them.  That's what I do when I know that I won't be seeing a class that time.  So 2K and 2G miss their class the first time that week, and resume with Steady Beat lesson 1 on their 2nd meeting time. 

Having all these lessons to pick from is also good because I KNOW that there are some lessons that we put in as filler lessons for those classes that never seem to miss music.  When you have it all laid out in front of you, you can then decide that since one class is behind, they can skip a certain lesson or game and still get the objective that you are aiming for!  Anyways, that was my random idea for the new school year, and we'll see how it works out!!