Just K.I.S.S it!

Sometimes I drive myself crazy with the amount of 'stuff' that is piled up in my classroom and office.  The problem with planning hands-on and interactive activities for the kidlets is that the amount of counters, baskets, games, puppets, clipboards, stamps, playdough (you get the picture!) is just phenomenal!  Add to this the fact that I am a group work fan. :) I've pieced together all of the best bits of different programs with the time and resources I have available to schedule activities that I know my Preppies will benefit from. In my classroom we do 4 sets of groups a week - one activity per day for Reading Rotations, Writing Workshop, Maths Time and Brain Building.  Of course, these all happen at different times of the day and all require 4 sets of materials.  Keeping a handle on where the treasure boxes for the pirate booty counting game were put, or where the googly eye pointers got stashed usually ends up with my group work table looking like this at the end of the day:

"Pop it on the table" results in bits and pieces from all of the groups loitering here until I get a chance at the end of the day to put them away.  Luckily, my classroom was built in the good old days when Prep was purely play - so I have storage that looks like this:

Although there is definitely more user-friendly shelving around (this is about half of the shelves I have that were built to store square toy boxes) these little cubbies were just right for turning into group work hidey-holes that after a bit of cleaning and laminating this afternoon now look like this:

Yay!  Such a simple solution!  Now everything that I need for my groups is all in the one spot, and the kidlets will know exactly where to pop their materials when it's time to pack up. (Pencil graphics from Ashley Hughes.)  There's even space for the materials that are on high-rotation to be stored when they aren't needed for a group that week:

I think there's a few more things in my classroom that I need to kiss.  Keep it simple, silly!

Lauren