How I Spent my Winter Vacation

Have you ever seen the episode of Friends when Chandler discovers Monica's secret closet?

It's confession time.  I might have a similar closet at preschool.  You see, teaching requires a lot of "stuff" - craft stuff, play stuff, science stuff, holiday stuff, book stuff, dress-up stuff.  You name it and I probably have it in my closet.  

By nature I am a fairly organized person.  I label just about everything in my house and try really hard to give everything a put-away place.  The problem is we have too much stuff!

So, during winter vacation my assistant, Super-Gemma, came over to help organize the closet.  (Disclaimer:  She offered!  And she knew exactly what she was getting herself into.  She's my partner in closest crimes.)  

We started by taking (almost) everything out of the closet.  Just doing this requires Herculean effort!

 

The school started to look like this:

(This is the point I question the logic behind putting a Play to Learn watermark on these pictures.  Do I really want a Google image search of the school to pull these up?  I don't think so!)

We were able to consolidate a lot of supplies and get rid of a lot of things that we don't use.  We went by these guiding questions:

1. Have we ever used this since the preschool opened in 2005?
2. Is this the best way to teach XYZ?
3. Are we saving this because we do use it?  (There is a strong temptation to save things because we could use them.)

If the answer was NO to any of the three questions, it didn't make the cut.

Then, when we were almost finished, my sad little filing cabinet sat there all alone.   When I left the public school to teach preschool, I selected about 2 dozen files (and left the rest) that I thought I might be able to use again, someday, when I made another career change.  I have no idea what my next career step might be (or when!) but for some reason I felt that I needed to keep these files.

Oh my word.  There were so many files.  I still had things that other teachers had given me when I was student teaching in college:

These units were produced on a typewriter, with hand-drawn pictures and directions on how to mimeograph the student pages!  

I also had file folder games that I had made during Child Development class in high school, and spelling assessments from my second graders who are now in college.  What.In.The.World.

When all was cleaned out, there were 24 empty binders:

And just a few extra empty containers.

This is the discard pile.  I offer my deepest apologies to the trash people, the recycling people, and the landfill.

Now I'm off to go make new labels to spruce up the improved storage closet!  How have you spent your winter vacation?