A Place for Everything!

You hear this saying, “A place for everything and everything in it's place”, but really, how does that work? I have approximately one million (dramatic right?) different manipulative in my closet. What do I do with them?  A few years ago I attended a Daily 5 conference. I had been using Daily 5 for years, but this really reinvigorated my love for the process. One thing that really stuck out to me was word work, and how I could give students the complete choice of what they wanted to do.  That also solved a huge problem about manipulatives. I was able to create a spot in my room and leave everything out. ALL THE TIME! No longer did I have to find spaces to store all of my little letters. It was open and available for students every single day. AND, they knew how to put it all away.    Here is a picture of the space I created:

These are all of the materials I included. It is a lot in a pretty small space but my students quickly learned #1 what their favorites where and #2 how to put them away exactly the right way. A few key details were that I gave them what they wanted (fun stuff), it takes ZERO prep time for me each week, and that there were still some paper options my students love (stamping sight words, word search, write the room, and sentence building). I also taught my kiddos to throw away a dried out marker and just grab a new one if they picked the white boards. This helped me weed out a big bucket of old markers! Tricky I know, but super effective.    If you would like to see more about these activities, I blogged about them HERE.    Thank you for following along today! Here is a free file just for you. It is a sample of some of the cut and glue activities I use in this set up. If you would like to see the full set, click HERE!