Organizing Supplies at Home - Classroom Freebies

Hey everyone! Today, I wanted to answer a question that was posted on our Facebook page wall that is from Pamela O.

She says, “Hi Charity, I am looking for some creative inspiration for my home office. I was wondering if you had any tips for how to organize the plethora of teaching materials and supplies I keep at home.

My classroom just doesn’t have enough storage space and I do a lot of prep-work at home. My home office doubles as a guest room and I still want it to be cute and functional.

I would love to see how other teachers have organized their work spaces at home as well. Thanks.”

Pamela, that is a great question. I have a ton of materials here too.

If it’s a guest room, you probably can use the closet. Your guests probably aren’t going to be using a ton of closet space while they are there.

In the closet, place a three shelf plastic shelving unit. You can find them at Home Depot, you can probably find something really cute even at Target but honestly Home Depot works great because you can get the super heavy duty plastic ones for garage storage.

I put one of those in the side of my closet, on one side of my closet and I start grabbing 99 cent plastic shoe boxes with lids.

I stack them up, usually do 2 or 3 stacked up tall, in each space so you can get 2 or 3 across.

You will have 6 or 9 per shelf on the plastic shelf.

Start dividing your resources into groups and put the groups into the plastic tubs.

Then you can label them. Just print them off on your label printer with avery sticky labels. Put labels on the outside of them so you know what it is.

You can easily grab and go.

On the top of the closet on the shelf, I like to get plastic colorful milk crates. You can store larger items in there.

Make a cute little label template and print it off on card stock (rather than the sticker paper) and then cut it out with a cute little scrapbook punch.

Put a regular hole punch in it and use a piece of string to tie it from the front of the crate so it hangs on the front exactly what the contents are inside.

Also: make sure to use that door space.

I like to grab a hanging shoe organizer.

Separate supplies into that shoe organizer. Hang it from the inside of the closet somewhere, or hang it from the clothing rack that’s in the closet and put it along the wall so it is out of the way.

You could actually do several of those shoe organizers across the clothing bar.

I print those little labels on card stock, punch it out with my scrapbook puncher, and then instead of hole punching and hanging with string, I use a safety pin and pin the label on the front of each one of the shoe organizer pockets so I can easily know what the item is inside at a quick glance.

Always remember to go vertical whenever your organizing, not straight across and you will get so much more space out of that.

A couple other quick tips, if you have dressers, you can use the dresser drawers. The bottom ones.

Obviously if you have guests they may want to use the top drawers. I like to keep those open for my guests but the bottom drawers, you can use for storage.

Also, large rectangular under the bed tubs with lids on them work great. Put your items in there and slide it underneath the bed.

You can lay those all across the floor underneath the bed for storage.

Again, use a sticky label for the front so you know where everything is.

The last suggestion is if you can find an old filing cabinet at a yard sale or local consignment shop, use that to store manipulatives and files in.

It doesn’t have to just be for offices.

Decorate the filing cabinet with some pretty contact paper that would match the theme of your guest bedroom.

In the inside of the filing cabinet, you don’t even have to use hanging files, you can actually store materials in there as well.

I personally love to use hanging files and then sort my construction and copy paper by color. It is super easy to grab that file when I am making copies or need a certain color for art projects.

I hope those were handy ideas for you to organize your guest bedroom/home office. If anyone else has some great ideas, we would love to hear them in the comments below as well!

Need a few labels to get you started?

Download the set below and either print on Avery 2×4 labels or plain paper and cut them out. I love ready-to-go resources!